Selamat Datang di Jakarta!
4pm on Tuesday morning we step out of the Soekarno-Hatta Airport and face Jakarta’s moist heat. Adding the corresponding physiological reaction to an 89kg baggage with overweight desperation and 24 hours on the road left us with an unflattering body odor. A nonetheless charming driver brought us across half of the huge and astonishingly clean capital to our backstreet B&B. RedDoorz @ Jalan Bangka was a tidy and comfy place to stay, although the second B resulted in a diet.
We tend to burden us with tight schedules and two major duties were waiting for us the following day, namely booking a flight to Manado and picking up 700 preordered Petri dishes. To satisfy our thirst for genuine cultural experiences, we decided to go for public transportation. It was, however, based on two mistaken assumptions. Firstly, to cover 20km between rather specific locations in Jakarta cannot be accomplished via a single public transport vehicle nor in a decent amount of time. Secondly, people from Jakarta know this and don’t try to. I believe we deserved the resulting struggle. Helpful and patient individuals on the way proved a creative understanding of simplistic approaches to Bahasa Indonesia and finally lead us to PROLABMAS, where we hoped to find our Petri dishes. Which we did. The competent team even easily forwarded us to a travel agency. Within an hour everything was sorted and we were left with a 12kg box of +/- fragile lab material. After wandering around mindlessly but cheerful for a while, it dawned on us that this was of little use to find means to reach home and we turned to a POLPP patrol for advice. Approaching uniformed men on a paramilitary vehicle may not come naturally, but we have had amazing encounters with police officers in the past.
They:
-invited us onto their pickup,
-suggested the Grab app to get a cab,
-called a cab as we didn’t have mobile internet, and
-joked with us completely incomprehensively for us, while
-waiting with us for the cab to arrive, and then
-explained the way to the driver (at least we think so, it was in perfect Bahasa Indonesia).
Amazing, again.
After a brief night shortly past 4am, we headed off, leaving Jakarta towards North Sulawesi, following the call of stunning coral reefs and numerous bacteria therein, now with a bit of additional baggage on top.
