The Big Durian, from the slow lane

As a reporter I’ve always struggled to write about traffic. It’s a prosaic and dull affliction of modern societies that nearly everyone in the world has experienced. You do from time to time get the colorful anecdote of a woman who gave birth to triplets in the back seat of car after a 19 hour traffic jam, or gas stations going dry because of delivery trucks stuck in highway gridlock. Most of the time there’s no other way to say it other than “traffic here really sucks.”

I unfortunately can’t think of many other ways to describe traffic in Jakarta, even if it is possibly the most mindboggling of any I’ve ever seen.

The Big Durian, they call it, after the notoriously stinky Asian fruit. It’s a maze of highways, buildings, and malls with an absurd population density, a near absence of public transportation, and virus-like proliferation of vehicles.  Jakarta doesn’t have a great reputation as a travel destination, which is possibly what made me all the more determined to find some tourist attraction in it. It reminded me of my first impressions of Sao Paulo, notably the lack of any obvious geographic landmarks or clear references to distinguish between a jumble of avenues lined with concrete buildings. If someone can love Sao Paulo, someone can love Jakarta. Or, to be fair, if someone can love Caracas, someone can love Jakarta.

The most common mode of transport in Jakarta is the cheap Japanese motorbike, which leaves highways so crammed with bikes that they often aren’t moving much faster than the cars next to them. This gives an idea of what it looks like (watch the right side of the screen). It’s not uncommon to see a woman wearing a neon-pink hijab, a Guess t-shirt, jeans and flip-flops driving motorcycle with two kids on board. Nor it is rare to see a motorbike hauling a cargo of merchandise that would barely fit in the trunk of a sedan, all precariously arranged behind the driver. Liz told me that she once spotted a man driving a motorcycle with a second person behind him carrying a full-sized goat.

I can’t say I really gave Jakarta a chance, and traffic was a large part of the reason. Though I could fairly well argue that I never had a chance to give it a chance. My main attraction in the city was to visit my cousins, to I spent my first several days in Indonesia doing just that. We managed to fit in a trip to the satellite city of Bogor, and to see some social projects involving trash picker families that were amazing experiences (more on this later). 

On our last day before coming home, we made a concerted effort to see the city. It was tough.

We drove with Liz and my aunt Carol from South Jakarta all the way up to the historical center along the shore that holds some of the few architectural remnants of the Dutch colonial period. Plowing for much of the morning through bumper-to-bumper traffic, which Joni deftly navigated, we visited a phenomenal puppet museum, had lunch in a cool building that once housed Dutch authorities that now functions as a jazz bar and restaurant, and then stopped in for an hour and a half in the National Museum. The traffic time was easily triple the time spent on the activities themselves. 

After arriving at home, Liz promptly informed me “Just so you know, I’m *never* going all the way up there again.” I couldn’t say I was surprised.

I still believe there are fun things to see and do in the Big Durian. I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to them. Sorry, Jakarta, I really did try.