Jakarta (megalopolis)
February 16, 2008 — tbelfield
Review
Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations
Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels, Valiz Publishers, 2007, 179 pages.
What were we doing? Now I remember, we were headed to Gambir Station to buy tickets to Perwokerto and then after that just burning time before we had to take the new Toyota van my wife’s brother had just purchased back to his house in Depok and meet him there after he was finished working for the day.
It must be a tradition in Indonesia that when you purchase a new vehicle the first thing you do is loan it out to family member.
So then, it was Budi, the husband of my wife’ sister, and I, with the new van, heading out from Citayam on an early sunny morning and headed into Jakarta for the day. We drove out of the neighborhood and onto the main street winding past shops, stores, and businesses packed to the very edge of both sides of the road and which seemed to stretch away like an endless film loop, then on past the Citayam train depot bottleneck, on through Depok, and then finally taking the back roads all the way into Jakarta.
By this time I had been to Jakarta so many times that I had lost count but with out doubt on every occasion there seemed to be a new way to go and new things to see. This day was no different. Budi was taking me on the maximum tour. Down streets I never knew existed, past apartment complexes, malls, embassies, cemeteries, monuments, and a lake where he said he had once seen monkeys. “But maybe no more“, he added. I really liked the notion that there was a lake with monkeys. I filed that away in my head where the idea has rooted into a life of its own to this day.
Jakarta - Lake - Monkeys
Just like that.
Budi clearly knew what he was doing and where he was going. He only mentioned once or twice, out of sincere humility, that he was lost as a result of on the spur of the moment experimenting with a new shortcut. Still, we were back in good order in a snap.
I was there for the ride and the pleasure of watching Jakarta float by my window. But I wondered how he knew where he was going and where we were.
“Budi, how do you know where we are and where we are going?”
“When I first moved to Jakarta I just drove around and around the city day after day”.
Budi had, through time, experience, and experiment created in his head a mental map of Jakarta. He could not survive there with out it. He had made place out of Jakarta’s urban space. He had worked up his own internal geography.
Whether I realized it or not this is what I was also doing. Through most of our day I had no landmark I could anchor myself to in the warren of Jakarta’s densely complex streets punctuated by crazy intersections where no pedestrian would dare to tread, until I saw, in the long distance, hovering in the sky like a signal, the National Monument. I knew then Gambir Station was not far off.
I think it was at that time that Jakarta started to click in my mind
There is an occasional moment or two during the day when all this comes back to me. Out of the murk it comes to the surface like a fish in a pond and rolls its back once or twice. There I am magically arriving at Gambir Station or stuck in the jammed traffic around Blok M or picking out the landmarks heading back Citayam, home, the mosque across the street, the beautiful faces of the children returning from school.
How do you know Jakarta?
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