July 5 - Jakarta Real City Tour

July 5 Day 141

         We got up and did stuff in our room until it was time for our real Jakarta tour, which we were looking forward to.  We took the train downtown to the main square and this time found an underground walkway that avoided one busy street but meant we had to cross another to get to the pedestrian street.

         We had some trouble finding the restaurant we were supposed to meet at and asked some people where it was.  Here we had the classic Asian problem of not wanting to say no, as we got some random instructions as to where it was close to and one person said it was closed.  I took one more look and found the restaurant and we met up with our two guides, Ronny and Anneke,  a husband and wife team.

         We ate in the simple but delicious restaurant they had chosen and introduced ourselves.  She was quiet and probably the organizer who kept things going.  He was an extroverted talker who used to be an artist (quite famous from his own description) and very detailed about Indonesian history, which we discussed at length. 

         We walked along a street close to the main square where he asked people selling simple wares on the street what their story was and took us into a back alley where the street buskers lived.  It was very basic with small dirty living spaces set up in ramshackle ways among the shining costumes and makeup stations.

         We then boarded a local bus with seats torn up that took us to a park where we got into a tuktuk ( I forget what they call them in Indonesia).  We stopped by a park that he said used to be low income housing and still had people living in it.  He mentioned how they had limited types of trees planted in public places and never replaced the fruit trees that used to be there as the fruit caused too many problems.  The result of this is that there were no birds in the park. 

         Across from the park was a dirty bay with shacks on the other side of it.  Behind the shacks were tall apartment buildings and in the water were cranes dredging out the mud from the bay.  He talked about how removing the mangroves hurt the wildlife and how the shoreline was being sold off to companies that wanted to build boutique hotels.  A short tuktuk ride along the filthy shore took us to the large slum where we spent most of our time.

         We started off in a dusty area with rickety shacks and pile of garbage burning.  Ronny found out from talking to the people there that the government was coming in the next day to bulldoze the area and kick the people off the land, some of whom had been living there for 20 years.  Meg made an impassioned video that hasn't yet made it to Facebook (wait for our movies about our trip, I'll insert it for sure).  When asked what could be done, Ronny said that he knew lawyers but the work was slow.  He had been involved in many protests but if 1000 police and soldiers come out with water cannons and tear gas, what can you do?  The people were not going to be given housing alternatives so that would be pushed further out  finally laid off when we kept insisting but our energy was pretty tapped by then.  We headed back to our room to sleep.or into more crowded conditions.

         We continued into the larger slum, where many of the buildings were made of concrete, there were shops selling everything you'd need and the alleys ran in all directions with houses and businesses.  Ronny talked with many of the people he met and seemed to be fixture of the neighbourhood.  Anneke had a bag with toothbrushes, pencils and treats for the kids that seemed to know to swarm around us when they saw us.  On girl had braces, which meant that some people living here were doing okay bus still didn't want to move.  There was a sense of community with things going on but the filthy streams everywhere and the lack of water had to be a deterrent.  Still, so many people smiled at us as obviously wealthy foreigners I was reminded of some of our Buddhist teachings.  These talked about our attachment to things and how wealthy people often were less happy than poorer people because as you get money you acquire things you become attached to which doesn't lead to meaningful happiness.  It can sound like romantic claptrap and people living here had to worry about their and their children's futures but everyone smiled at us and many were having a good time there.

         Groups of kids always clustered around us (certainly Ronny's doing) and we went for quite a long walk through the area, which must go on for kilometres.  We then got on more local transport, which were luxury cyclo seats which only fit one person at a time.  We went along streets with little traffic because of frequent steep speed bumps which we felt in our cyclos.  The homes were a mix of tidy and rundown.  Ronny explained that this area was different from the slum as people owned the land legally here, so it was a more mixed place but still under threat from development.

         Our ride ended in a big dusty square that looked like it held large markets at other times.  Another group of kids gathered around and they sang "Frere Jacques" to us in 7 languages.  We sang back a Beatles song and talked to a mother of two who looked 15 but said she was 23.  Ronny referred to these as "his people" as he had represented 500 families here.

         We took a tuktuk to another intersection and walked through a dark and crowded pathway of living spaces clustered along the train tracks.  We met a woman who lived in a small space with a cut window with her two kids up a ladder and down a narrow passage.  She had a dream to send her kids back to the country to live with their grandmother while she did laundry until she could buy a house for everyone.  She said it paid about $50 a month and Ronny said that at that rate the woman's dream wasn't realistic and she might be stuck here.

         we continued along the dark path until we came up by the tracks and watched a few trains go by just a few feet away from us and the people living there.  One place that was finished nicely and functioned as a shop/restaurant for the neighbourhood had a family who were very chatty with us.  They were very proud of their daughter who had gone to university and was on track to become a medical technician, the first university educated member of the family.  So success stories do happen.

         We came out by a dirty river by a bridge that Ronny said many people slept under the bridge.  We then walked under an overpass where the homeless gathered at night, each with their own space between pillars.  Only a few people were there but some had thermoses for makeshift cafes and spoke to Ronny easily.  One area close to the road was now being used as parking for a nearby Chinese restaurant so the people had less space.

         After all this they gave us a lift home and we talked politics most of the way.  Ronny thought that the current government was doing better than previous ones but that he companies that really ran things would try to defeat them in the next election.  He talked about how he can't return to art while all of these problems exist but he at least can use his notoriety with the media to call attention to issues.  The 4 hour tour was more than 6 hours for us and gave us lots to think about and showed us a side of Jakarta we wouldn't have seen otherwise.  Check out https://realjakarta.blogspot.com/ if you are interested.

         Back at home we had so much to digest from the tour that we didn't have the energy to catch a movie like we'd planned.  We walked in a different direction ad came across a shisha bar with Middle Eastern food.           There was one non-smoking area in the corner behind a screen and the food was pricey for Indonesia but it had been a long time since we'd had hummus.  The food was quite good but the roach that crawled out of our basket of naan and continued to explore our table made us grateful that we hadn't seen what the kitchen was really like.

         Back at the hostel we slept fine until about midnight when some kids started running and screaming through the hallways.  I got the staff member but we couldn't find them but he announced the problem at the bar and the mom came down and settled them.  Still, it was hard to get back to sleep and was our only bad night at the hostel.

A shack in a dumpy area with buildings behind representing creeping gentrification.  We were told that the city would be bulldozing this area tomorrow, leaving its inhabitants homeless.  The police and the army would be present at the bulldozing.

Me with our guide and one of he many groups of kids that clustered around us wherever we went.

A neighbourhood along the busy tracks of Singapore.