10 ASIAN ART Travel


Gamalan orchestra. Photo: Juliet Highet By Juliet Highet


L


ike some slumbering giant, sweating in coastal humidity, Jakarta is still roped by a fairly


authoritarian regime, and swarmed over by a population of more than 170 million (the largest city in Asia), who have made ‘street life’ into an art form. Traders, fast food hawkers, pick- pockets, and beggars – all the clamorous denizens of the informal economy (some might say the real one) share pavement space and traffic-polluted oxygen with the mobile-phone gesturing, power-suited high flyers of the booming Pacific Rim. Yet down between the stalls offering a myriad of different (delicious) snacks, whose rushed vendors have that marginally tense look of lives on the cutting edge of breaking even each day, there are punters receiving Urut massage. Apparently this not only relieves muscular and bone strain, it spiffs up spiritual strength as well. While on the main streets the blare of the Indonesian equivalent of ‘heavy metal’ from worn cassettes creates a manic, migraine-inducing contest with the hooting, tooting din of far too much traffic, a quick plunge down a narrow alley leads to the kampong beyond – labyrinthine villages of almost rural calm, where pots of pink bougainvillea and washing lines of elegant batik fabric make even urban slums look picturesque. Naturally Jakarta


is a kaleidoscope of 21st-


century ‘Southern’ city realities – flaky and frantic, grand and charming, in which past, present and future exist simultaneously. Tacky, psychedelic- coloured plastic facades cover Dutch Colonial stone shop-fronts, and just outside the closed doors of the obligatory air-conditioned high-rises and five-star hotels of any capital city, you can buy herbal remedies straight from eternal rice-paddy territory, or cartoon pop-art renditions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata


epics,


those Hindu yarns which are the subject matter of so many wonderful wayang puppet shows out in rural Java, despite the fact that Indonesians are 90% Muslim. (Jakarta is the home of Southeast Asia’s largest mosque, the Istiqlal – opened in 1978). Jakarta is Indonesia’s one true melting-pot; foreign and local; urban and rural;


new in a chaotically


contradictory way, and home to a dynamic, creative youth sub-culture, with its own style and music scene, by no means a slavish echo of the West. Even the name of the city is recent, bequeathed by the invading Japanese during the 2nd World War. For more than three centuries before that Jakarta was known to the world as Batavia, capital of Dutch ‘Indian’ territory, after they had intruded into the old Asian maritime trading world in the 17th century.


Te Dutch also called this extraordinary and ultimately addictive


Te old Staduis of Batavia is now the Jakarta History Museum ASIAN ART SUMMER QUARTER 2017 Views of Jakarta’s old town, Kota Batavia


Painted wood carvings for sale in the antiques market – old and new. Photo: Juliet Highet


THE QUEEN OF THE EAST


city the ‘Queen of the East’, so they must have appreciated something about it too, in addition to its trading opportunities. Yet her earliest recorded history dates far further back, to the 5th century, to inscribed Hindu relics of the kingdom of Tarumanegdra. During the 14th century, it was a port known as Sunda Kelapa, the entrepôt for the Sundanese Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran. Captured by the Muslims in 1521, modern Sunda Kelapa and its Pasan Ikan fish market nearby, are an evocative area in which to first taste the flavour of the great old trading port. Tall-masted Bugis schooners from South Sulawesi are anchored there, still active all over the archipelago. Tey belong to one of the last fleets of working sail boats in the world, plying the seas and carrying merchandise. At


one time gold, textiles, spices, pepper and all


sorts of other agricultural


produce were shipped as far as India and the Middle East, as well as all around the Java and South China Seas. We were invited on board one of these big schooners, which are built of wood, and watched timber and sacks of rice being off-loaded from the cavernous hold. Te sailors were relaxing while in port, gently strumming a guitar, playing with a cat, someone else snoozing. Te air was sweetly pungent with clove- flavoured Kretek cigarettes and the subtle spices that have always characterised Indonesian cooking. Incidentally Sundar means ‘pure’,


and Kelapa translates as ‘coconut’, and there are three restaurants around the harbour alone. You can have a good lunch for a laughably small amount, for


example, Ketoprak, which is bean curd, bean-sprouts and cold rice noodles with peanut sauce; then Udang Galah Besar - grilled prawns with spicy soya sauce, washed down with Bram Bali rice wine. Te Indonesian archipelago consists


of many, many islands, 13,676 of them, and hundreds lie just outside the Bay of Jakarta, known as the Pulau Seribu or Tousand Islands. Setting sail into the Java Sea, or more prosaically – taking the ferry from the fish market down the road from Sunda Kelapa port, wealthy Jakartans escape the city’s hustle for this idyllic playground. Te Tousand Islands are actually 342, including coral islets and sand bars, some of which are only visible when the tide is low. You can stroll round the coconut-fringed shores of some of the


islands in 20 minutes; on others lose yourself in tropical exotica, with fresh- water springs, old Dutch ruins and an occasional dilapidated Portuguese fort thrown in. Te clear waters are perfect for skin diving, with brilliant fish darting in and out of the multi- coloured corals. Just 90 minutes from the Marina Jaya Ancol, or minutes by helicopter ( if you should be so lucky), the aptly named Paradise Island and several others have been sensitively developed as the ultimate Jakarta bolt- hole, with superb sea-food restaurants, cottages and cabins for hire, and good diving and sailing facilities. Spices, as well as aromatics, luxury


fabrics and gold were the basis of Indonesia’s established long-distance shipping network on which the Dutch had their eye in the 17th century, as


JAKARTA


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36