Jakarta: part one

Where do I begin? What an amazing trip Dave and I were blessed with! We left on the 26th at 10PM for Taipe, to finally arrive on Friday afternoon in Jakarta, Indonesia. Total travel time was a little north of 24 hours, but they are 15 time zones ahead of us, so one loses a day. We flew EVA Air, a Taiwanese airline, which was very good actually. The 13 hour flight was on one of their Hello Kitty jets! I kid you not, everything had the cat on it: the cutlery, pillow, blanket, the cake had it built in and even the outside of the plane was fully painted. The stewardesses were all beautiful and so pleasant too, it was like looking at a fashion show. We were served some pretty good food too, from chicken porridge for breakfast, to Chinese cabbage and Dragon Fruit. Coffee was excellent, and Taiwan Beer, really that’s the name, was free! It’s a long, long way, but I arrived pretty well rested at 1PM.

We were met at the airport by a representative from the festival who took our passports and just walked us through immigration without ever having to talk to anyone. We got them back the next day with all visas properly executed; this is the way to do it! The drive was quite something. By the airport it’s pretty green and not densely populated, but as we started to get into the city, the shanty-towns got bigger and bigger, with big modern buildings dotting the landscape everywhere. Dirty, dirty, DIRTY waterways everywhere, that much was clear, even from the bus with the windows closed and the airco running. Traffic was crazy, but when we got off the freeway into downtown it really got nuts. With mopeds, carrying dad on the back, two kids between him and mom, and then another kid in the front, with no helmets, flying around, even on sidewalks, the cars were stuck. We sat on the same block, which turned out be 300 yards from the hotel, for more than an hour! People pooping in the river, then a little further two fishing! Yet the faces were peaceful, even on drivers……there was lots of honking, but the polite kind, just to let each other know where everybody is. Even the bums sitting by the river, smoking, playing chess, didn’t look unhappy.

When we finally got to the hotel around 4, we entered a different world. Named after the most famous monument in Indonesia, the Hotel Borobudur is right in the heart of Jakarta, a five star oasis, with an Olympic sized pool and guys with AK47s in the lobby at all times! On Saturday some politician must have stayed there because they opened a can of MPs. I kid you not, there must have been 50 men with AKs guarding the joint. You can’t enter any big building in Jakarta without going through a metal detector, but this was kind of freaky. Otherwise, the hotel was quite great. Excellent rooms, tennis courts with free lessons, and for us free food three times a day! The Bogor cafe in there is famous for its Oxtail Soup which Keiko turned us on to. AMAZING! They had excellent bread, soups, fruit for days and of course lots of Indonesian and international dishes; I must have eaten more different foods in these 9 days than in the whole year before! And then there was the coffee…..we were gonna get spoiled, that much was getting clear….

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