Surviving the concrete jungle of Jakarta

WORLD reporter Sophia Lee is traveling through Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, and other Southeast Asian countries. She’s sending us regular reports of what she sees, feels, and does—Nellie Bly–style.

JAKARTA, Indonesia—The city may be paved with cement and asphalt, and its ever-shifting skyline may glimmer and blink like Manhattan’s, but Jakarta is still very much a jungle.

Take its traffic, for example, which the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks as the worst in the world. Here, walking on the so-called sidewalks is an extreme sport. Sometimes the jagged path leads to a big, gaping hole, which isn’t easy to spot when it’s dark. A few close encounters cured me of my habit of checking emails on my iPhone while walking.

On the numerous lanes without sidewalks, I braved the swamp of free-for-all traffic. Here, Bajajs (auto-rickshaw taxis) and motorbikes weave between lanes and cars like mosquitoes, always getting in the way while buzzing out streams of exhaust. I frequently spotted families of four or five squeezed onto a single motorcycle, the parents sandwiching their little kids. And the cars! They’re crocodiles snapping at your feet, zigzagging and accelerating without warning. Several times these cars zoomed so close by me that I thought they had bulldozed my foot.

But like a guerrilla fighter, I quickly picked up some survival instincts and thickened my sensitivity to certain risks. I learned exactly when to dash across the road in the face of unceasing, charging beasts, and sensed how to distinguish between motorists who simply refuse to stop for pedestrians and those who’ll reluctantly brake at the last second. And, hey, I survived. My limbs are intact and my feet can still walk.

It can’t be easy governing a city like Jakarta, a booming region that’s developing too fast and too much. There’s an ever-growing demand for residences and office space in this populous city, so buildings rise higher and higher, but without much holistic, long-term planning for sustainable development. Urban developers seem to follow whims and quick profits rather than smart concepts and careful organization.

The Central Jakarta condo I stayed in, for example, is connected to a multi-story shopping complex crammed with stalls selling female Islamic fashion, jeweled sandals, and counterfeit Ralph Lauren bags. It took me 30 minutes to wade my way from one end to the other. I think I spent half my time in Jakarta being lost in maze-like buildings and twisting alleys.

But getting lost can also be a lot of fun. One evening I made a wrong turn into a narrow alley of warungs (tiny shops or eateries) constructed from painted wood, bamboo, and tin. For such an obscure, dimly lit pathway, there were steady streams of pedestrians and motorcyclists carrying sacks and crates of stuff. Curious, I kept walking up, trying not to get trampled by growling automobiles, and then smelled something earthy, something organic … ah, definitely manure.

It was a goat farm. In the middle of the road, just one block away from skyscrapers, was a wooden barn of white, black, brown, and spotted goats chewing languidly on hay. Chickens clucked all over their trough, while a few hungry looking, stumpy-tailed cats slunk about. Several steps farther, I saw farmers and vendors hawking all sorts of local produce: giant pale cucumbers, vibrant little chilies, dirt-matted potatoes, green and Napa cabbage, long violet eggplant, and the ubiquitous, tropical vegetable kangkong.There were also a whole row of stalls piled with whole coconuts, next to sheds with hundreds of bunches of green, podgy bananas hanging from the wooden ceiling. It was a gloriously chaotic, colorful, cacophonous scene.

As I looped back down the alley, happily swinging a hot plastic bag of singkong goreng (deep-fried cassava), I heard the call for evening prayer. Every day, starting at about 3:30 in the morning, the prayers begin. Five times a day, the chants and hums of Arabic prayers ripple from mosque to mosque like nature’s alarm clock, swelling and tossing all the way up to my 29th floor bedroom. Sometimes the imams sing softly, alluringly; other times they ululate, leading congregants to groan and wail in unison.

I walked back home that evening listening to these deeply affecting cries. Along the way I came across a skinny man with a scraggly beard and sun-scorched skin caked with dirt. It was clear life wasn’t a breeze for him, yet this man stood barefoot on a piece of discarded tarp, using that as his prayer rug as he joined the evening prayer in the middle of the street. His eyes were shut tight, his palms were lifted up in reverence, and his lips were moving silently.

Here in Indonesia’s concrete jungle, where every citizen has to officially identify with one of six recognized religions (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Confucianism), secularism is not as much of an issue as it is in the West. Here, there’s still an organized system of faith and worship, an invisible, intelligent authority that lords over the inhabitants.