On to Batavia, James!
November 29, 2009
Whether we admit it or not, all travellers have some form of preconception of their destination - New York, Time Square; Singapore, shopping; Sarawak, headhunters. Doesn’t matter whether they’ve been there before, the internet takes care of a whole lot of research at the fingertips. These preconceptions are not incorrect. They’re just one pixel of truth out of a much larger collage.
For me, Jakarta was a larger Surabaya. I’d been to Surabaya twice, and Bojonegoro, also twice. That was all Java. I’d seen first-hand was life for the average not too well-off Javanese was like. I’d also stayed in a nice hotels there and given the thumbs up for the service industry in Indonesia. And so I thought Jakarta would be a bigger and shinier version of Surabaya.
I was right to a certain extent. I just didn’t expect how much bigger and how much shinier it was by comparison. Soeharto International Airport is a lot less frenzied than the boiling cauldron I imagined it to be. My ride was waiting outside. He didn’t have a sign, like he said he would but he really didn’t need it. He just walked up to me and asked; I am that obviously not from Indonesia.
Driving through….No. Crawling through two hours of traffic to get to the Hotel Gran Melia, I was fascinated by the slum-organic-metropole mishmash of the place. I saw a slimming centre back-to-back with a slum village. A few inches up the road, ragged kids and adults were pan-handling in the middle of the gridlock. In the middle of cars crawling through a red light and horns blaring like the end of days, a young guy was walking through the traffic like Jesus on water, selling pirated 2012 DVDs.
Lives are so polarised here. Fifty metres from the main door of the hotel, a team of guards in full uniform went through the Mercedes I was in, and us inside, with metal detectors. In front of the main door, more scanners and detectors. It reminded me of meetings I had at the US Embassy. Right beside the hotel property, humble roadside stalls line the street, the type everyone warns you about. I ate at a couple of places like that once, in Surabaya. No gastronomical disaster occurred.
The hotel is nothing short of opulent and grand, falling just a few inches short of magnificent. In that sense, it’s really like any other 5-star hotel in the world. Or is it 6-star? Who keeps count?
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