Quality time on Jakarta's buses

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October 22
Despite being a night person, Debby emerges from her tomb at 6.30am to have breakfast and then drive me to the station. With memories of Myanmar railways rumbling in my mind, I am pleasantly surprised by this train which proper seats and a bathroom with running water and everything.
Yannie, a CS friend of a friend in Phnom Penh, kindly meets me at the station. There is a huge storm and a lot of SMSing on BlackBerrys and we get in a taxi where we remain for some time. Traffic is moving at about 2 miles an hour so there is plenty of opportunity to examine Jakarta’s endless skyscrapered terrain, especially as we seem to double back and go in a circle. But Yannie has lived in Jakarta for more than 20 years and she seems to think everything is under control. Although it would be nice if a few cars started moving.
At the café we finally reach there is a large crew of Indonesians ready to laugh and ask me about Monkey Island. Yannie has asked me if I wanted to spend the weekend hiking up one of Indonesia’s 129 volcanoes, and I’d said yes. I didn’t have any proper shoes but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. More worrying was the 4am start. Even though I’ve largely given up alcohol (too expensive in Indonesia) early mornings make me feel ill.
Meanwhile we play Shithead, a card game that requires some skill, but not much. The loser, or shithead, gets to wear a crown of toilet paper. I don’t know what I’m doing for the first two rounds but somehow manage to avoid being a shithead anyway.
Then we begin the trek to Yannie’s house. She lives out West, near the airport. As it’s late we take a taxi, but usually you need to take a motorbike to the house from the taxi stop. The house is on a small gang in a maze of lanes that I never leave or return to on my own.
I stay in Yannie’s room, which means her aunty has to get out of bed and go and sleep on the floor with an uncle and a cousin. It’s about 1am and we pull a few things together for a hiking expedition and fall into bed. I can’t find my pyjamas, and in the interests of a quick getaway, sleeping in my clothes seems sensible. A few hours later, something electronic makes a noise and wakes me. Yannie fiddles with her BlackBerry and goes back to sleep.
I wake about 8am. The trip is cancelled - Yannie’s friends waited at the bus station for some Germans for six hours and they never turned up. Three days later we still didn’t know what had happened to them. I figured they were either in a coma or the rudest people ever born - everyone was worried about them.

We have Saturday to play with so we take a motorbike to the bus stop. The traffic is crazy and the bike is all over the road, but that’s how you do it here. No helmet either.
It’s hot by now and we wait for a Jakartan eternity for the bus which finally arrives and could give Myanmar buses a creak for their money. After an hour or so of purgatory - I can’t fit in the seat, my ‘long’ legs are a problem - we get off at a shopping mall, buy coffee and get in a taxi. I don’t even know where we’re going, but we’ve been going there for about three hours by now.
We arrive at cooking club - about four hours late, but ready to eat mountains of Italian food. Later a friend drives around in circles in South Jakarta (I’m not sure if this is for my benefit). I get a good look at where Jakartans with a bit of cash live, then we head into the centre and walk around Soeharto’s phallic national monument.
Yannie does a bit of tour guiding and because it’s still early, we take the bus back. Jakarta has no trains, just these buses with a dedicated lane and a kind of pen everyone is herded into, so they just pile, or rather push, onto the bus when it stops at the pen’s sliding doors. I have a few bus experiences during my five days in Jakarta and they are exhausting. Hundreds can be waiting for a bus and they just surge forward when the doors open. The queues can be enormous. Staff monitor the doors, I guess to avoid anyone doing anything really stupid. It’s an authentic local experience, and one I’m glad not to have to do every day.
Jakarta looks glossy and modern, but the infrastructure is appalling. Or just non-existent. When we get to the end of the line, with its crumbling overhead crossing, shacks, and guys hanging around on motorcycles, we're still a long way from the house. We ride motorbikes for at least ten minute to get back to Yannie’s place. I have no idea where I am.
Next morning we go to a wedding. I’ve never been to an Indonesian wedding before - Yannie wasn’t going to go, but she selflessly attended to give me the experience. I put on my one good outfit, attempt to do something with my hair and dust off a few bits of make-up.
We decide to take a taxi there, to avoid feeling like old tea towels by the time we arrive, but even so we still have to get a bike to the taxi stand. My skirt is not that short, but it’s kind of tight for straddling anything and I think the locals get a bit of an eyeful. Heigh ho.
The function is only for two hours, and it’s in a large corporate building in the centre of Jakarta. We get a gift when we arrive - an ashtray with the bride and groom’s heads on it. Lots of food stalls are set up in the ‘foyer’ area of the event. When we go in there is loads more food, huge floral decorations and some traditional dancers performing before a stage on which sit the happy couple, glittering in sequins and jewels and metallic thread. The bride’s hairline has been painted to look a bit geisha-like, and she wore a headdress with sparkly balls on it. She looks tired, probably from wearing such a heavy outfit.
When the formalities end, half the crowd - bored children, resigned men, women with big hair and too much eyeshadow - sprint for the buffet while the rest pile onto the stage to pay their respects. We do buffet first, and while it’s not as vicious as trying to get on a bus, there’s still a bit of shoving, though to judge from the mountains of food being replenished I doubt anyone will go hungry.
It’s not that long since breakfast, and there’s only so much goat stir-fry and fried rice you can eat before you lose interest. The desserts are fruit, little dry cakes and sliced jelly stuff. There is something with chocolate sauce, but it’s gone before I even realized it was on offer.
We go and greet the bridal party when the crowd has thinned a bit, and then as we don’t know anyone, we take photos of each other and think about leaving. Then we do leave. We go to Batavia, where the Dutch created their port in the 17th century and where colonial buildings line Fatahillah Square. Of course we have a drink at Café Batavia, which is all shutters and dark wood and ceiling fans.
The place is fairly empty, and Yannie says sometimes there is a lounge singer and you can get up on stage and sing with him. I am dubious about this, but then the lounge singer arrives and because it’s so boring performing for four people, he’s quite excited when I have a look at his song book. The pages fall open on Delilah. I love it, it’s just about the most melodramatic song ever. The urge to bellow, ‘Why, why WHY? Delilhah,’ rises within me. So I do it. Weirdly I am not nervous, just a little underwhelmed by my lack of vocal talent.
Yannie sings Hey Jude, and though we spend the next part of the afternoon at Jakarta’s old harbor - climbing in and out of various local mysterious and bumpy vans - by 6.30pm we are doing karaoke with another friend. It's my first time, and I find bellowing away to music is very therapeutic. We fight our way back to the house on the bus and local forms of transport.
Next day we are exhausted and do very little. It rains and Yannie mutters darkly about floods. The following day we have to fight our way out of the house so Yannie can go to a bank across town. We wade through flood waters, then ride bikes through more water as the rain hits my eyeballs like small pebbles. I am seriously fatigued by the time we get to the bus stop. Then there’s a marathon ride across town through more floods and crazy traffic and then in and out of a van and shivering in the bank because we are soaked and the aircon is really cold. After that we have to go to a mall and eat pancakes.
Then Yannie spends three hours going to south Jakarta to another bank and I make my way to a mall and we meet there later before finally going to a couchsurfing gathering and countdown to Yannie’s birthday.
The next day I have to get to the airport, and Yannie’s cousin takes me to the taxi stand on his bike. The lanes are still flooded. Between the cab drivers and the increased tax to leave the country, I spend most of the money I changed the night before getting to and through the airport. I’d like to see some of that departure tax go into improving Jakarta’s infrastructure rather than some Swiss bank account.

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