2023 Overseas Travel Blog

#6 Java, Indonesia

A couple of months ago I met a Javanese content creator online who makes beautiful videos and images of nature spots and promos for hotel and resort websites. It was lovely to see Indonesia so well appreciated. He offered to be my guide.

Click on the images to see short videos

I didn’t want 24 hours in cattle-class to Europe without a break. I found it cheaper to buy separate return tickets online with layovers in Indonesia. I decided to fit 10 days of exploration in on the return leg. Way back in 1985, I backpacked through Bali, Java and Sumatra and I’ve visited Bali a few times since. I wondered how the country would compare with my guide’s videos and with the past. So from Poland, I went from one homogeneous country to another, arriving in Jakarta in time for it’s 400^th birthday on June 22^nd.

_{Click on the image to see a short video}

I spent the first few days in the Old Town area of Batavia – capital of Dutch East Indies – at the Mercure Jakarta Batavia Hotel. The surrounding area is quite historic, with many Dutch buildings dating from the 18^th to early 20^th century. The United East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, abbr. as VOC) was a chartered company established on 20th March, 1602[2] by the States General of the Netherlands, the first joint-stock company in the world,[3][4] granting it a 21-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in Asia.[5] Shares in the company could be bought by any resident of the United Provinces. It is sometimes considered to have been the first multinational corporation.[7] It was a powerful company, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts,[8] negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies.[9] Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade.

_{It’s worth zooming in on the fine print on these three maps of Batavia’s growth dated, 1682, 1744 & 1914.}

Nearby is the Jakarta Museum, built by the VOC in 1701 as the City Hall of Batavia.

_{Click on the image for a short video of the museum.}

It displays objects from the prehistory period of the city region, the founding of Jayakarta in 1527, and the Dutch colonization period from the 16th century until Indonesia’s Independence in 1945.

Sadly, many of the buildings in the area appear to be abandoned and left for tropical plants to colonize … and surprising, considering their valuable location.

The hotel itself it is a sanctuary from the outside. Images don’t convey the heat and humidity, but you can see the smog. There are SEVEN different buffets at breakfast, which, although seemingly opulent and luxurious, were not particularly appetizing (sometimes not only cold, but old), a common theme at hotels I found, particularly as there’s no bacon in this Muslim region. Sex and bacon are so delicious, as Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn) says, ‘You can do monogamy, but it doesn’t stop the bacon smelling good.’ To add a grizzly, literal dimension to it, cannibals report that human flesh tastes like bacon! Thankfully, the gym looked out on a beautiful garden courtyard, proving someone there knows how to do beauty.

I wanted to find out how a population of 151.6 million people on an island of 124,413km² can live well. It’s the 13^th largest island in the world and the world’s most populous island, home to approximately 56% of the Indonesian population.[3] My guide seems quite happy, but he’s from a well-to-do family. The truth is, most don’t live well. Huge apartment blocks have been built, but unlike Singapore where they replaced slums, in Indonesia they have merely absorbed increased numbers of people. The slums persist. Some transport options have improved to a Tokyo standard, but the streetscapes and road networks haven’t in 40 years. It’s hard to overstate how bad they are. They’re noisy, dirty, crowded, smelly, ugly, dangerous and woefully time-consuming. Development doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent.

Most of the suburban trains were imported, used, from Japan. It was nostalgic for me, having commuted on them for 13 years in Fukuoka and Tokyo! They are well-built with signage and announcements and it’s good to see them still in use. Bike ramps at station stairways are a great idea, if people ride bikes, but I didn’t see anyone on pushbikes.

Most of Jakarta reminds me of a Blade Runner dystopia. There is a very lackadaisical attitude that you can see in the way people carry themselves and the monumental indifference to detail and asthetics [sic] – particularly worrying on a local airline. Communication often fails to result in the expected outcome – and it’s not just the language barrier. It’s like everyone’s smoking opium and, as Karl Marx said, Islam probably has a lot to do with it. Religion is a refuge and escape from the material world, which would be healthy if it weren’t so imperative. All the daily prayerful wailing is, I suspect, stultifying and infantilizing. The whole country seems to be in a malaise it’s not even aware of. Beauty and competency in public works is sorely needed. Morale would rise dramatically just by attending to the streetscapes. I’m not suggesting a dramatic top-down reconstruction, the way Napoleon III, and his Prefect for the Seine, George-Eugène Haussmann wiped out masses of medieval slums to redesign and rebuild Paris into grand boulevards. A sensitive approach that benefits the poor would be very gradual.

This public notice in the Jakarta Museum illustrates the futility of development whilst doing nothing to curb birth rates. There are children everywhere, who are a delight, but as long as birth rates remain high, development treads water. If Australia weren’t so growth-addicted itself, it’d do its little bit to help with some tough love – a foreign aid program of family planning and the message that high population growth countries must accept the consequences of their fertility policies. In terms of its impact on other countries, our immigration program is an exercise in phoney compassion (it’s not the poor we take in) and impracticality – alleviating population pressure makes no real dent in their numbers and does nothing to incentivize family planning.

I was keen to get out of Jakarta so we headed to a nearby regional city called Bogor. Bogor is that little bit cooler and the air cleaner. It’s central Botanical Gardens are a haven and is also where the former Dutch Governor-General’s retreat from Jakarta is situated. If it were me, I’d have built it at a cool hill station in the mountains.

Nonetheless, Bogor has it’s appeal with the occasional beautiful house and cafe.

Eager to get close to the cool national parks, we took to the mountains, booking a cabin at one of the huge tea farms an hour away.

The “Bobo” cabins are – to me – oddly-over reliant on advanced technology; air con in a balmy climate, no cross-ventilation and artificial nature sounds. Pleasant as it was to be high with a cool view, the lack of maintenance and cleanliness was again, sad to see… so many people and yet so little done. “Bobo” is a koala, despite there being far more exotic mammals in the nearby jungle.