Transvestites with tambourines

---

Jakarta - Sounds cool but is a hole.

We didn't have the nicest introduction to Asia's poorest country. Indonesia has its fair share of bad press lets face it. Governments post information on travel websites and deter would be travellers from coming here. However Indonesia has the 4th largest population in the world along with 3 different time zones so its pretty big.. and to put it all into perspective chances of something happening are slim! ;-)

After a quick check on the UK's government website to see if the places on our list were safe we were relieved to see our route was ok.. or maybe some government official was too busy fiddling his expenses to update it!!

That didn't stop us finding Jakarta to be unpleasant. We checked into an expensive hotel (preparing ourselves for a safe haven - should the outside be unbearable!) and then headed out for a bit of nosh. The main backpacker bit is on a street called Jalan Jaksa which was interesting to say the least!

Kids dressed in rags begging, open drains with sewage smells attacking your senses, transvestites with tambourines (hey that sounds like a band!) doing a dance for 'spare change', stray cats dogs and cockroaches scurry about for street space, motorbikes with dodgy geezers go zipping past, touts taxis and pickpockets all watching your next move ... all within an hour of being in the country... surely it gets better than this!!

That night amongst all the madness we managed to get some street food and enjoy our first beer in a while before retiring to bed planning our next destination!!

The following day we headed out hoping to see past Jalan Jaksa and enjoy Indonesia. We walked into the centre of Jakarta only to be put off even more. This place is a complete dump. Rubbish is thrown everywhere, people sleep in the street and smog lingers in the air like a bad smell (we could go on). The city itself was just an ugly grey landscape of tall buildings and roads with nothing of interest at all. We even resorted to the guidebook a number of times but that produced zip.

The only funny thing we encountered in Jakarta was a guy in a Juventus - Del Piero shirt with a guitar busking to a group of Muslims eating lunch! We even ventured down the back streets to see if we could find a snip of local life which was a waste of time .. dodging beggars and unsavory characters.. left us thinking ..'why did we come here'!!!

Hopefully the rest of Indonesia will prove to be different to Jakarta.

Oh and the reason we hardly took any photo's was because frankly we didn't feel safe enough to get our camera out!!

Lee and Michelle.

---