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October 13, 2005
Back in Jakarta
LOCATION: Jakarta, Java
SEE WHERE WE ARE - NEW!
NAUTICAL MILES KAYAKING: 849
STANDARD MILES BIKING: 830
I was last here in April sorting out our visas. Things were chaotic then and judging by the number of hours recently spent stuck in traffic traveling around Indonesia's biggest city things haven't changed.
I submitted my application for a 3rd visa renewal on Monday. The immigration office in south Jakarta is a ramshackle building in a rundown part of town that you'd have to think twice about walking around in the day let alone after dark. Once inside the belly of the beast, with rows and rows of brown-uniformed clerks sitting at desks in lines up to 10 deep like something from Orwell's '1984', one is subject to a human pinball experience: that of getting bounced from one counter window to another; a rubber stamp here, a signature there. Each time a clerk proudly executing his or her duty by gracing one's application form with yet another blue stamp.
Just as I was thinking I'd get my passport back the same day plus extension I was told to come back on Wednesday. On Wednesday I was directed 10km across town to another office for another series of stamps. Still not passport though - 'Come back on Thursday'. Today (thurs) I was directed back across town to the original office, where I was sure I'd get my passport back, only to be told to.....come back tomorrow. Indonesians have a word for this that roughly translates to rubber time. I any getting to know the meaning of this word quite well.
Local people have told me they're just giving me the 'run-around' until I part with more cash. But coming from a culture where bribing is almost non-existant, it's not something I altogether find easy to engineer with any degree of subtlelty.
One good thing has come out of the whole deal though. Today I got to drive my own taxi around Jakarta.
The taxi that I got into to get to the immigration office (for the umpteenth time) was skippered by a driver that had not the slightest idea of how to drive or where he was going. Even after consulting my map (he might as well have been looking at the stars) and having it turned the right way up for him at least three times, we still continued happily bunny-hopping along in 5th gear and in totally the wrong direction. I then asked if I could drive which he obligingly agree to!
I wonder if I'd get the same response asking a London taxi driver or New York cabbie if I could drive? Maybe not.
Posted on October 13, 2005 3:13 PM