Day 20: Historic Jakarta

Today is Saturday and Pallavi’s cousin has started his weekend. He suggested taking us to historic Kuta Jakarta, which is the old Dutch capital of Indonesia. Indonesia was occupied for years by, first the Portuguese, then the Dutch East India Company, and the Netherlands. The crumbling heart of Kuta has all of the traditional Dutch-style architecture, the original Indonesian headquarters of the Dutch East India company, all in a town square. The square is filled with brightly coloured bicycles with bicyclists wearing matching brightly coloured sun-hats that you can rent. It also has Japanese-style costumed characters all over the square that you can take photos with. It’s filled with art, with food stalls, with drink stalls, all in a festive flavor. It is pretty spectacular.

We decided to have lunch at the nostalgic Café Batavia. It is the 2^nd oldest building on the square, built in the late 17^th century. Filled with dark teak woods, passing the band stage (no band right now), up stairs that are covered with old photos of 19^th century celebrities. It is pretty grand and lovely. Great, but expensive place to have lunch (and Pallavi did get a bad prawn, so we got that dish knocked off of the bill).

We spent the rest of the afternoon at home. Jakarta truly is a mega-city. As Pallavi says, it looks like Delhi will when construction is done and Delhi is ‘complete.’ It sprawls like Dubai, but lacks the modern architecture. It is way more advanced compared to its island cousins. The people here look way more Malay in looks compared to the people on Flores, who out of context, look South Indian in complexion.

That night we took it easy and Pallavi cooked one of her favourite receipes to say thank you to her cousin for letting us stay with him. We also decided that instead of taking the long overland route from Jakarta to Bali the next day that we would try to go to this active volcano Krakatau instead and fly from Bali to Jakarta on the 5^th, the day before our international flight back to Australia.

My tummy hurt a bit, so I called it an early night, since we’d have to get up at 4:30 to try to get out to where we needed to get to try to book a boat.