First Time in Jakarta

Bible Study, Anti-War demos, Girls, and Blok M

“You’d be crazy to go to Jakarta, it’s a dangerous place, something bad could happen to you there”, so said Dian as she stretched out on the bed of my room in the Ramayana Hotel in Kuta, Bali.  For a girl I’d only met five hours earlier Dian was certainly very concerned about my well-being, probably something to do with her deep Christian faith I imagine.

She had popped into the Santa Fe Restaurant for a pizza and I couldn’t help noticing the Bible that was sitting on the table beside her, it turned out she was from Sulawesi and was working for a shipping firm in Denpasar and was just on her way home from Bible class.  We got to chatting and went to the Hard Rock Café and then back to my hotel and she was now dispensing travel advice like an official at the Australian embassy.

It was too late, I’d been bored in Bali and fancied an adventure, my ticket was booked and I was flying to Jakarta the next morning.

I remember well the day I first arrived in Jakarta, it was the 29th of March 2003, the invasion of Iraq had started a week earlier and my first day in Jakarta coincided with the biggest demo in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto, a half a million angry people in the world’s largest Muslim nation were thronging the streets of central Jakarta in protest at a war in which my country was one of the main protagonists.

Having done a bit of research on the internet I had opted to stay in an area called Blok M.  Apparently this place had modern shopping malls, restaurants, and many lively bars popular with westerners, in other words the kind of place in which someone like me with no experience of Asian cities other than Singapore could feel at ease.  Well here I was now, in Blok M Jakarta, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Blok M is not like Singapore. Oh, there was a nice shopping mall alright and to get to it you merely had to run across a busy intersection avoiding the maniacal swarm of clapped out buses that spewed out of the nearby bus station belching foul diesel fumes and weaving across lanes at speed racing to collect any passengers before their competitors could.  If the street was dangerous the pavements were lethal; cracked, broken and in parts actual open sewers, better to take your chances with the buses and the insane motorcyclists.

I found the lively bars too, and on a grey wet afternoon nothing could look drearier than that strip of forlorn looking, bedraggled bars with their tattered signs bearing names desperately evocative of Hollywood glamour; “Top Gun”, “Oscars” etc.  I remembered a trip I had made to Havana and how sadly seedy the place had appeared, Jakarta made Havana look like Zurich.  That settled it; I was going to book the first flight leaving for Bangkok the next day.


I hailed an old jalopy of a taxi and using sign language got him to understand that I wanted to find a travel agent.  He drove me in the clogged Jakarta traffic for an hour and a half before leaving me at a travel agent which I soon realized was two blocks away from where we started.  He charged me accordingly, I didn’t care, I had my chance to get out of this God forsaken hellhole.  Having got my ticket I stumbled over the cratered pavements past the beggars and made my way back to the hotel.

As I stood at the traffic island in front of my hotel a big old pick up truck rolled past, it was full of young wannabe jihadis, wrapped in Palestinian Shemagh scarves and waving flags bearing the symbols of Osama bin Laden and Hezbollah, clearly on the way to the anti-war demo.  As fate would have it the truck stopped right beside me and sure enough I soon caught their eye, one by one they all broke out in broad grins, “Hello Meester!”, “How are you?”, laughing and giving me big thumbs up signs, the truck was soon on its way again lurching forward as the lads in the back waved and called after me.

I was soon to discover that truck was a perfect summary of Jakarta itself; dirty, run down, seemingly dangerous, threatening even, with a packed huddled mass of humanity picking its way in the rain through snarled up traffic but containing some of the nicest, friendliest, most easygoing and welcoming people you could ever hope to meet anywhere.

That evening in the hotel bar I got to chatting to Riya and her friend, being keen to show around a newcomer to their town they persuaded me to accompany them to a nightclub in one of Jakarta’s big five star hotels.  Wow! Packed to the rafters with some of the best looking women in SE Asia it was quite an eye-opener, as was Riya’s behavior.  Who knew such a demure lassie could be so wild when the drink and the music kicked in?

As for when we got into the taxi back to my hotel, goodness me, well I never, what must the driver have thought? Extraordinary.  Riya wished to reassure me the next morning that she didn’t normally behave like that but she didn’t get out much and liked to be able to let her hair down, she hoped I wouldn’t think that she was that kind of girl.

During my many visits again to Jakarta in the coming years I saw Riya a few times, almost invariably she was draped over some Australian or American guy in some bar or nightclub.  Somehow I suspect she may well have been exactly that kind of girl.  As for Dian, the last time I saw her was in Club 66 on Kuta beach, it was 3am and she was dancing on a table along with a six foot pre-op transvestite in leather hot pants; her Bible class teacher no doubt.

Originally from Ireland Basil travelled around SE Asia before washing up in Jakarta where he now intends to remain

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