jakarta, depok

Jakarta
day 4:
We woke up early today and went to airport which kinda tricky as the metro would only leave us about 25 minutes of room before the check in counters would close. We made it though. Barely. After arriving in Jakarta we found a taxi and told him to bring us to a place where hostels could be found. We didn't book anything (because we thought; what would Tin tin do?). The chauffeur said he knew where to go, but apparently he didn't. I was already warned that they tend to say they know even though they have no idea what you're talking about. However, we figured he's a professional and have plenty of experience with stuff like this. After about an hour of driving through crowds of people we told him to stop at a convenient store as he didn't seem to have a clue.

Traffic here is chaotic and extremely crowded with no apparent way of deciding who has the right of way apart from who has the most guts. It took our taxi 45 minutes to drive through 2.7 km of traffic. Kids here seem to use this to their advantage by charging people for clearing a place in the traffic jam for money. Not much though, basically just a few pennies and nickles. Can't be good for their health since the smog here is intense. Life is pretty cheap here though. A meal is between 2 and 4 euros. Bottles of drinks about 50 cents.

We went to see the national monument in Jakarta. It wasn't all that impressive. It was merely a spike of concrete about 100 meters tall. What was fun though that the local people, kids in particular, treated us as more of an attraction than they did the Monas. Lots of pictures were taken of us that day.

Day 5:
We decided to move away from the hotel and go to a guest house. It is fairly cheap and we thought in a less crowded place. The guest house is nice and clean. The environment around it is not. It seemed somewhat like a shanty town with lots of debris and garbage all over the place. The streets are still completely ridden with cars and mopeds. Traffic is still chaotic as ever. We decided to go ahead and leave Jakarta as soon as possible.

We got in contact with Toene, a great uncle of mine, who has his own guest house in Depok.

Depok
Day 6:
On the 6th day we traveled to Depok which is somewhat of a suburb of Jakarta. Although less crowded than Jakarta, the smog is still palpable. Everybody moves around in cars, motorcycles or scooters. Traffic is still a nightmare. It is similar to how cyclists ride their bike in Holland except they use enormous cars. Right of way is given, but taken by forcefully jamming your car between the others with ample use of the horn.

The guest house was huge, Toene has done quite well for himself here with several people in his employ. We also noticed that relationships here are more traditional. Men earn a living while women are generally responsible for the household.

Depok does not have a lot to offer tourists except for huge malls that cater to your every commercial requirement. People tend still tend to treat us as an attraction. Toene told us it was because they're not used to seeing tourists and Caucasians in general. Lots of people wanted to take pictures of us and with us with their blackberry phones.

Day 7:
We went to a different mall to buy supplies and other stuff. We've started to accumulate more and more stuff which we have to lugg around from one place to the other. Alcohol is hard to impossible to come by around here probably due to the Islamic religion which seems most prevalent here.

There was free WiFi in the mall which gave us an opportunity to book a flight from Yogyakarta to Bali. We intended to stay in the cities of west Java longer. However, the chaos and smog didn't do it for us so we decided to lengthen our stay in Bali instead of roaming around in smoggy cities. It is our intention to still go to Bandung to see where my dad spent the first 3 years of his life before going to Holland. After this we're going to try to take a train to Yogyakarta.