We flew Singapore Air on June 11, via Singapore, arriving in
Jakarta at about 4PM and exercised our two-month visa for Indonesia. It took us a while by public bus to reach the
train station, where we purchased our onward tickets to Yogyakarta for the 14th, giving us a few days
to see a bit of Jakarta, a sprawling city of 9 million or more. We had been
misguided by LP into thinking there were special bus routes which would make
the journey faster than traveling by taxi. Our taxi from the train station drove
around for an hour looking for our little-know apartment hotel, M Residence,
which we found was in a decent neighborhood (Menteng) but had the disadvantage
of no nearby easily walked-to restaurants or grocery stores. It did have a pool and exercise room, which
we took advantage of. We had found this
on Agoda and it was in the area that we wanted to be in and had the facilities
we were looking for. We will not stay
there on our return trip to Jakarta to fly back to Chiang Mai.
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| The bottom right square upper left corner is like what we would find! |
The next morning we took a tour of the very extensive
National Museum, using a free docent service that our friend Connie Ikert had
told us about, and enjoyed this a lot. This
museum is one of the best of its kind in Indonesia and one of the finest in
South East Asia. The museum houses
collections of cultural objects of the various ethnic groups from around the
country as well as artifacts from the Hindu-Javanese times. There is a large display of Chinese ceramics
together with ceramics from other time periods and trading areas including the
Middle East. The exhibit of old gold jewelry from several hundred years earlier
was fantastic. The first visit would not have been nearly as interesting had we
not done the docent tour by the Indonesian Heritage Society. Leslie went back a second time and spent
several more hours focusing on the textile and ceramic areas. Only part of the museum is air conditioned so
best to go when the museum first opens. The
museum was established in the Dutch colonial times and we saw references to a
Johannes van den Bosch who was a governor of the area for awhile. Not a family relative however.
We also cased out a couple of malls to get an idea of fixes
prices for Indonesian handicrafts etc, and had dinner at a lovely restaurant
called Lara Djonggrang which was in an old colonial building serving Javanese
court food which we enjoyed and the presentation of the food was exceptional.
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| Textile Dissemination map at the museum |
In the afternoon of the second day we used a guide, car and
driver to see several areas of Jakarta, including the old Dutch town of Batavia
and it’s central square, the port, and a model village called Taman Mini
Jakarta showing the life-styles on the different islands. Our guide was a delightful Indonesian lady
that was in her 70s and spoke Dutch and English. Her name and contact information had been
provided to us through Connie. Then we caught our 8:30 AM Executive Class train
for an 8-hour ride to the central Java city of Yogyakarta
on the morning of the 14th. We were in the first class but not on
the most up-scaled train but our car had AC and that is what we had focused
on. While we had brought snacks to eat
the train staff did have a hot menu that they came around with so many
passengers were ordering hot meals. The scenery was primarily through rice
fields and only made 3 or 4 stops along the way. When we cut across Java from the north to
head south was the only time that the train climbed up minor hills and was on
an elevated track.
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| Java Map |
