Bogor Botanical

When I got to my hotel in the wee small hours, I had already decided that Jakarta was my least favorite place on the trip. That was a little unfair! It was based not only on the ride in from the airport, and often rides from airports don’t show off the best side of cities, and also the reading I did on the way, which said that Jakarta is a sprawl with no real center, no easy way to get around, and not a whole lot to do. My plan was to use it as a base and take day trips, since I couldn’t get around easily with the big green suitcase.


The museums of Jakarta weren’t open on New Year’s Day, so when I finally got out of bed at around 9:00 am, I had a day trip in mind, to the Bogor Botanical Gardens. The hotel concierge insisted on getting a driver for me; I’m still not sure if he did that for safety reasons, to offer good service, or because he got a portion of the proceedings (that immigration officer made me wonder), but I couldn’t persuade him that I wanted to take public transportation, and in the end it wasn’t so bad to have a driver.


Much of the population of Jakarta must also have decided to take the one-hour trip to Bogor for the day, but that was fine. I might have been the only tourist there! A group of students wanted to practice English with me, which was fun. The botanical garden is well-known, with a lot of exotic trees and plants, but nothing looked that out-of-the-ordinary to me, and I basically had a nice long walk in a lovely park setting, which was a fine way to spend the day.


When it was time for the driver to pick me up, I realized that all the cars looked alike. How was I going to find him? And then I realized he would find me – I looked different from everyone else! I was very interested in comparing this, the largest Muslim country in terms of population (Indonesia has the fourth-largest population, period, in the world), with Morocco. There weren’t as many women in head scarves, there were more couples, there was a similar lack of personal space (compared to my own, anyway). I had missed the call to prayer while on the mainland– it was good to hear it again. But it seemed odd to hear it in Arabic in a non-Arabic-speaking country.


My hotel was in the old Dutch section of town – it wasn’t near the center (turns out there is a center of sorts, no matter what the book says) but since one of the main reasons for coming to Indonesia was that my father had lived there and my father was Dutch, it seemed the place to stay. I went for a little walk and found the one restaurant in the area, Café Batavia – good food (though not Indonesian), and it had wi-fi. So after dinner I went back to the hotel and got my computer and went back to the café and bought my ticket out of the country. I’ll admit, the neighborhood was a little desolate (and my book said it was iffy), but I walked back and forth every night that I was there and, although I did have heightened alertness, I never felt unsafe.