No, She Went of her Own Accord

Welcome, music-hall loving reader, as this week I recycle an old joke and talk of our experiences in Indonesia.

Our main stop in Indonesia was Jakarta. This ended up being a wild and weird one! As we came into the bay, a huge thunderstorm blew up, with various shades of tropical rain (all the way from "heavy" through to "insane") falling all morning.

Being in the bay also gave us a phone signal, so we could research what we were going to do. Our shuttle bus appeared to be going only to a dull shopping mall, a significant distance from the main sights of the city, so we were excited to find that there was a commuter rail service with a station not too far from the port. We started planning to walk to the station, then get the train to the main sights of central Jakarta.

We got off the ship and started walking in what started off as a downpour, and became a deluge. We were wearing raincoats, but my bottom half in particular was getting soaked. Add to this that the roads appeared to not really have pavements, and there was literally no-one else walking, and it was starting to seem like a not-great idea to be out and about. After about 15 minutes of walking, including dodging the traffic to cross at various junctions, we gave up and returned to the ship to take the shuttle bus.

The shuttle bus took us to a mall in Northern Jakarta. We'd previously been warned that traffic in Jakarta is among the worst in the world, and whilst it was busy, it looked comparable with, say, central London. The difference is that a lot of the traffic is small motorbikes: the local rideshare services, the equivalent of Uber and Lyft, are Go-Jek and Grab, where you summon a lift on the back of a small motorbike, and they're all over the place. The overall impression is that you're watching a report from afar on BBC News; I was looking for Jeremy Bowen on the corner in a cornflower blue safari suit with a camera crew, but didn't manage to see him.

We got to the mall and spent an hour or two schlepping around. The mall was home to many coffee places, some even with decent espresso machines, and after surveying them all we found one which served me a pretty great double espresso, and Helen an English Breakfast tea, all for about $3 US. A bit of a contrast from the $12 plus tip this would cost you in the Bay Area!

The mall was a strange mix of low-end US brands (Wendy's, KFC, Aunt Annie's, Baskin Robbins, and bizarrely, ACE Hardware, although inside the latter was more like a tatty version of Target than what an ACE Hardware looks like in the US), local eateries, and local low-cost shops. The biggest of these was Matahari, which the guide on bus was proud of, but appeared to be a bit like Primark. Anyway, you could get a pair of jeans there for about $25 US should you have wanted to. We instead visited Mr DIY, which was more like a budget version of a UK Woolworths store, or maybe Wilko's or something: closely-stacked shelves with budget packs of 10 biros for $1 US, an entire aisle of footpumps, that kind of thing. The whole mall smelled mildly of mothballs, had an awful lot of empty units, and made me feel like I'd somehow arrived in Aldershot.

Having bought some things to send home, we decided to try and find the Post Office. When we tried to ask the locals where to find such a thing, looks of mystery descended. Partly this was because there are not that many English speakers here, and my Indonesian isn't that strong, but even to the English speakers this was apparently an odd request. Our bus guide thought we were asking if there was a Post Office in the mall, and couldn't seem to understand that we might want to walk to a Post Office elsewhere.

Fortunately Google Maps is pretty good here, and showed a Post Office about a mile walk away. Alright, we thought, let's go.

Combined with what happened in the port, my experience is that Jakarta is probably the least walkable place I've ever been, worse even than Silicon Valley, which is basically a just big industrial estate over wide areas so not walking friendly at all. Here in Jakarta, it appears that everyone just gets about by motorbike, so there is little or no provision made for walking. Walking away from the mall, the pavement disappeared, dumping us in the road, then came back, then became a narrow set of flagstones next to a two-foot-deep drain, then took us around the corner where it disappeared again. Along the sides of the roads are massed ranks of parked motorbikes with the Go-Jek and Grab riders sitting there too. I couldn't decide if they were staring at us because we were stupid enough to walk, or whether we were the obvious white tourists, or whether the former implied the latter. Either way, this explained why the locals couldn't work out why we wanted to go out of the mall.

Road safety, Indonesian style

We were disappointed not to see the highlights of central Jakarta, but in some ways our experience here felt more quintessentially authentic: the traffic here is really bad, so everything's a road, so you can't walk anywhere. The bus back to the port took us past some obviously grimy, poverty-ridden areas, which again brought it home that this still is a very different place to Europe or the US. Next stop Malaysia!