The Missing Ingredient: Notes from the Streets of Southeast Asia: Indonesia

Jakarta Part 2

Here are just some more pics of my last day or two in Jakarta. A big crazy city where poverty and luxury are living side by side. The inequality in the city is staggering.

Side street coffee club

At first when I walked into this building I thought it was abandoned but I soon realized it was full of resourceful men selling car parts.

This was near my hotel.

And this was next to the trash

Traffic in this city is bad at all times of day

The best satay place, lamb pieces being interspersed with lamb fat!

Borobudur is is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist Temple. This temple is the best preserved temple I have been to, I was struck by how well they UNESCO money had been spent and the carvings were so well preserved. After visiting Thailand and Burma and seeing the amazing Stupas and Temples this site was a bit underwhelming. If you are new to visiting temples it will fascinate you.

Pangandaran, Indonesia

Panandaran is a very small fishing village on the west side of the island of Java. I accidentally ended up here because of a misunderstanding with the receptionist in Bandung. I was supposed to go to a place with a volcano and explore in the mountains. I instead ended up going to the beach on an eight hour minibus. I arrived at night in a torrential rainstorm. So high on the street that it it reached my shins. In the morning I realized that my comfy and quiet hostel was located practically next to the beach. For the next couple of days I enjoyed the beach which I rarely do. The nature in this area is really nice, but most of the coast line has also be destroyed because of the gigantic tsunami that hit it's shores in 2006. If you find yourself in need a beach this one is great, and if you are a beginner on a surfboard the waves are really good.

Fishing by dragging a massive net from the beach.

I happened upon to groups of college students all going through a sort of hazing process where the upper class men and woman were yelling at the new recruits and making them crawl through mud.

Magnificent coast

The makings of a peanut sauce, the key is palm sugar

The peanut sauce added to tofu, green beans, and a type of sticky rice that is all over Indonesia, plus shrimp crackers that were purple.

Fried fish with sweet chili sauce.

Bandung, Indonesia

Mango and smiles

I have been interested in visiting Bandung for a long time. As a fan of the author Richard Wright I had first heard about this city when I read a biography of Wright and it mentioned that he had written a book about the Bangdung conference in 1955, this lead to the formation of the non-aligned movement that is currently still in existence. Although I did not see many remnants of the conference I did get to see what is currently happening in Indonesia youth scene. I was once again taken in by a friend of my vinyl friends in Jakarta. He showed me his great record collection and later we drove to the top of the hills in Bandung and attended a huge party being thrown by Levi's. The world is flat, what one group consumes another can simply log on and participate in that community. The attendees were incredibly hip but also in the midst of clove cigarettes and people drinking beer were young woman with hijabs. It makes me think that Indonesia has found some middle ground at the moment where both the modern and the traditional can coexist.