Yesterday afternoon, after sitting in traffic breathing the suffocating air for hours, I confidently stood in front of the reception desk at the airport transit hotel again. It’s a different receptionist this time, he looked up and down the reservation table, and shook his head, “No, I can’t find your reservation.” “That’s not possible. I was here yesterday, and you told me that I have a reservation for tonight”. He searched more carefully again, “Ah, found it. It’s canceled!” But this time, he was able to reach my local agent on phone.

The agent thought I was to arrive on Monday, so canceled my reservation after he couldn’t find me at the airport in the afternoon. Then he said, “Anyway, there’s some changes. We are not flying tomorrow, thus we will stay in downtown tonight. Dave (the guide) will explain everything when he arrives tonight”. That doesn’t sound good.

It’s almost 11pm when the guide Dave and two other climbers from the UK arrived at the hotel. While I was on my flight to Indonesia, a riot erupted in Timika of Indonesia Papua due to conflicts between local tribes and the police. Quoting from one news report, “normally such fights stop when the death toll on both sides become equal or one tribe pays a hefty fee”

So here I am stuck in Jakarta for an extra day. A couple of other teams who were one or two days ahead of us are still stuck in Timika.

Today’s latest update seems not bad. The local police, who we paid a hefty fee to in order to obtain permits, guaranteed full responsibility for our safety. So we are flying to Timika early tomorrow morning, and then we plan to head into the jungle directly.

Shortly before 5am, I woke up to the prayer chanting in the neighborhood.

I finally studied the city map to orient myself, and called a taxi to visit the famous Plaza Indonesia, an upscale mall in the heart of downtown. The flawless design and luxurious decoration, the shining display of jewelry and brand name merchants would qualify this mall as a high end mall in the US as well. Well, my main purpose was to come to have lunch at Sari Ratu, an Indonesian restaurant recommended by my colleague Patty.

The moment I sat down, several waiters came up and dumped nearly 20 plates of various dishes on my table, including a large bowl of rice that was enough for 10 people, then left me with just one smiling waiter, who was holding out a menu to me. “These are all for me?” I can’t believe it! He nodded with a smile. “You are not joking with me?” He sincerely replied “No”. I took a quick glance at the menu, then pushed back to him, “Then I don’t need to order anything. This is too much for me already!” He still insisted on handing me the menu and pointed at the prices on the menu. I finally figured out that he does not understand English that well, so I resorted to guessing plus gesture language to communicate.

It turns out that they serve lunch in the opposite way Chinese dim sum is served. Instead of you picking what you want from a cart, you choose what you don’t want on the table and tell them to take it away. Out of my habitual curiosity, I picked dishes that I never had, including a plate of brain! “What animal’s brain?” I asked. “Ah, yes, animal.” He was happy to catch the key word. “Is it pig? Sheep? Cow?” He shook his head and tried hard to think, then finally found the right word, “Yes, Beef!” “Ah, cow! Mad Cow?” I jokingly asked him. Again, he happily nodded his head. Even though I knew he probably didn’t get what I was joking about, it felt kind of scary to me, especially since I just read “Deadly Feast” a few weeks ago. I took a bite from each of the two pieces of brain in the plate, and calculated my chance of catching Mad Cow disease. The thoughts made me less excited about the dish.

Once the city wakes up, its traffic seems to be in rush-hour mode until late night. When I hired a taxi to go back airport in the mid afternoon, the highway was jammed all the way from the city to airport. So my taxi driver took some local roads to bypass. Now I finally see why Indonesians have so many motorbikes. A two lane two way local road is often monopolized by the vehicles from the dominating direction. In this case, there are three or four outbound vehicles on this little two lane local road so that only motorbikes can pass from the opposite direction. Occasionally a car that tried to come from the other direction would cause deadlock for a while. But drivers are really skillful too. They often quickly jump onto the side walk of the opposite direction to make room for the opposite traffic, then continue back in the wrong lane.

Traffic also causes bad air. Like many cities in China, Jakarta is a very populated city with a large urban/suburban area, but the public transportation appears to be very limited or not efficient. In this big city, nothing is really close to other things. Thus, the motorbike is as popular as the bicycle is in China, and many people cover their face with a bandana while riding; so do traffic police and workers at toll booths.

Jakarta
Jakarta is a big city. The urban sprawl is comparable to the major cities in the world, and the modern part is just like any metropolitan cities in the western world. Though drivers do cut through the traffic at will like they do in China, they do respect police a lot! For example, the taxi driver dare not stop to pick up clients in departure zone at airport, so I ended up jumping into a moving taxi when no policeman was in sight.

My hotel is located on a busy local road, like the one that crosses an old farmer’s market, such as Xin Jiang Village, in Beijing 10 years ago or even worse. The surrounding area looks like residence for a poor labor class, which is in sharp contrast to the modern high rises in the back drop when looking out from my hotel window. Despite my initial nervousness about safety concerns in Indonesia, I ventured out for dinner after 6pm, and it was already dark outside. To be safe, I didn’t even carry my camera.

I actually felt quite comfortable and soon relaxed while I carefully picked my steps over dirty puddles, holes, and bumps, to navigate through food/merchant stands, random round-ups of stuff or properties on side walk, and intimidating traffic that was not afraid to cut by within just an inch of pedestrians. Each side of the street is lined with all kinds of not-so-tidy shops and street venders, and numerous motorbikes cut between the traffic to make the two-lane street wide enough for 10 motor mobiles. My biggest challenge was crossing the street, which takes a lot of courage, patience, and luck among this no-rule no-light river of traffic.

"TAK-SI!!"
What impressed me most in this area is the creativeness and pervasiveness of the “taksi” system here. At a hotel or airport, you can see the standard taxis like those in any other city; then there are numerous three-wheeled little motor carriage that can stuff in 4 or more people in a space as big as one square meter; yet, there still are numerous motorbikes providing individual “taksi” services. 

When I was in Russia, I was afraid to look at men on the street because I was afraid of arousing troubles with those ubiquitous drunk guys; Here, I also had to avoid looking at men on the street, because almost every brief glance at them would get an offer for “taksi”!