Jakarta appears more developed than Saigon, and certainly more
developed than Thailand and Cambodia. Where Saigon has endless
streams of motorcycles, or motos, floating down its well-paved
streets, cars sit on Jakarta's roads, stuck in an eternal traffic.
Jakarta's malls have both real and knockoff products, which is a
welcome change from Thailand and Cambodia. In those, although real
branded clothes, watches, and electronics exist, they are much harder
to find and most tourists stumble only on the knockoff Gucci, Prada,
and iPhones. The largest and nicest of Jakarta's malls has only real
products, and they are sold for only real prices. In some cases there
is a 10-20% discount off the price I would see in the US. But sales
and discounts seemed rare, or perhaps this was not the season for
sales.
Jakarta has a noticeably smaller contingent of white people -- both
expats and tourists. Every country in the Mekong delta, it seemed,
was swarming with tourists. Additional evidence of this was the
vibrant tourist-based economy that I saw in Thailand, Cambodia, and
Vietnam. In Thailand there is of course the famous red light
district, which serves white tourists and, according to my depressing
book on sex slavery, many Japanese men. In each of those countries,
motos and tuk tuks stood ready to ferry tourists to any location for a
price well above the one they would charge locals. Streets in Phnom
Penh were lined with stalls of food for tourists; further from the
touristy roads, much cheaper noodle stalls catered to locals.
Jakarta is the most Muslim of the countries I have visited on my trip.
Yet this fact is much less apparent than I expected it to be. Every
third woman, it seems, is wearing a head scarf. Every tenth, or maybe
every twentieth, is fully covered with a black head-to-toe burka.
Calls to prayer sound five times a day, mostly annoyingly at 4:00am.
These calls sound different from the ones I heard in coming from the
minarets in Israel. Yet they are also very beautiful. I was woken by
the early call to prayer this morning, and stayed up listening to it
as it faded and was replaced by the rhythmic prayers of the gathered
congregation.
Overall, I really enjoyed my stay in Jakarta. One thing that stands
out, unfortunately, is the amount of time I spent stuck in traffic;
taxis are needed to get everywhere, and traffic often grinds all
movement to full stop. Perhaps I am more sensitive to sitting in
traffic because I grew up in Atlanta, where gridlock is a fact of
life. But in any case, Jakarta seems to struggle with this problem as
do most developed cities.
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