On Tuesday morning I left Bali and flew back to Jakarta. As you may remember, I was in Jarkarta overnight when I first arrived in Indonesia. Now I will actually spend some time here. I arrived at the airport about noon but it took another good 30 minutes for my bag to arrive. Then it was off my a car in a severe thunderstorm. It took almost 2 ½ hours to go to get to the suburbs where I’ll be staying with my friend, Lilies. It continued to rain until into the night. The next morning we (Lilies and I) had a car/driver take us up to the White Crater. Although this is a beautiful turquoise crater lake, the drive to it was 5 hours each way due to the perpetual traffic gridlock that seems to thrive here. Needless to say, this drive was a day’s adventure unto itself.
On Thursday, we went to Taman Mini Indonesia which proclaims to be ‘All of Indonesia in one park’. Since this is another suburb of Jakarta, it ‘only’ took us 2 hours to reach it by car. The park however turned out to be a disappointment to me. While all the islands and areas of Indonesia seemed to be represented, it was strung out, seemingly at whim across the park. Furthermore there was no real writeup (in any language) describing the specific areas. Still the created building and houses were classified by their specific areas of the country and many contained clothes and descriptions of local practices, marriages, etc. Also there was a clever miniature version of all the islands done to scale created in a man-made lake.
The islands in minature
On Friday I didn't do much but get ready for a very early flight to the island of Sumba on Saturday. Believe it or not, we will leave the house at 2:30 AM because of the traffic!
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