Indonesia

[Mark Dedrick]

This is perhaps a bit of a shot in the dark, but later this month my wife and I will be taking a trip to Singapore, Jakarta, Bali and Yogyakarta. We're visiting a friend in Jakarta, and only there for about 36 hours, so I think we're relatively covered there, although I will always appreciate recommendations. Has anyone been to the other places, and have any thoughts about where and what to eat? In particular I'm interested in thoughts on Yogyakarta. A lot has been written on Singapore, and to a lesser extent Bali, but I'm somewhat in the dark on other Indonesian locations. 

Thanks in advance. 

[Mark Dedrick]

OK, so we got back over the weekend from 16 days in SE Asia. It was an incredible and epic trip. I'm going to post a few things about it here in case it's of any interest to folks. For each location I'll do a post on general tourist stuff (lodging, transportation, sights, etc) and then one on food and drink. 

Jakarta

We were visiting friends who are currently living in Jakarta, and that was the only reason this city was on our itinerary. We met them there, stayed at their place, and then flew with them to Bali. Jakarta is an absolutely insane city. It has by far the worst traffic I’ve ever seen in my life, and it seems to be horrible 100% of the time. The traffic is in part fueled by the most motorcycles and scooters I’ve ever seen. They are everywhere, they travel on both shoulders, and in between every “lane” of traffic (lanes are more of an idea than an actual thing that exists in this city). They weave all around all of the cars and seem to be everywhere at once. There’s essentially no relationship between what color the traffic light is and whether or not cars will go through the intersection. In fact, throughout Indonesia, most intersections involve all of the cars simply entering the intersection together and then figuring out how to get where they need to go once they get there. I’m shocked that we didn’t see any accidents while we were there.

Cabs are cheap, and everywhere, and really the best and only way to travel around the city. On the tourist side of things, we started out our one full day in Jakarta in the Kota Tua neighborhood, which is the old town portion of Jakarta. It’s apparently been run down for a long time, but has been recently somewhat restored, and it was cool to walk around there. Amusingly, we were frequently approached by groups of Indonesian schoolgirls to have their photos taken with us.

We then went to Monas, which is their national monument. It’s similar to the Washington Monument but with a flame on top, and it’s located in the center of a gigantic park. To address crime in the park, however, they erected a gigantic fence around the whole thing, and restricted entry to four locations in total, and as a result basically nobody uses it. Which is too bad. Across the street from Monas is the National Museum, which we also visited. The museum was quite inexpensive (10,000 IDR, or about 70 cents) and nice, and also had groups of students who wanted photos with us, and a teacher who wanted to ask us questions about where we were from and why we were in Jakarta.

A quick aside on crossing that street to get to the museum. That road is approximately five lanes across (again, lanes are more a suggestion than a hard and fast rule), and there didn’t appear to be any lights or crossing signals (in fact I never saw a walk signal in Indonesia). So while there was a crosswalk there were no breaks in traffic, and there were the aforementioned motorcycles just relentlessly buzzing by. The way to cross in Indonesia is to use the “magic hand”, where you simply hold your hand out, and then confidently and slowly step directly into traffic. I was not super comfortable using this method, but it seemed to work, and we’re alive today to tell the tale.

One final thought, massages are insanely cheap in Indonesia, and we took advantage of that fact. You can hire a masseuse to come to your place and give you a 90 minute massage for about $12. It's unbelievable. 

Quick conclusion, this is the one city we visited that I wouldn't strongly recommend visiting. 

[Mark Dedrick]

Jakarta - Food

We were only in Jakarta for about 36 hours, so we didn't get to go too many places. 

The Hermitage – Great rooftop bar in a great old hotel overlooking Jakarta. This isn’t a place to go for a fancy cocktail, but it’s pretty great to watch the sunset and drink a gin and tonic.

Por Que No – A rooftop Spanish restaurant in the Menteng neighborhood. It’s perfectly fine Spanish food. I wouldn’t seek it out, unless you happen to be tired of Indonesian food at this point in your trip. I'm sure if I lived there I'd be very happy that this place existed.  

Café Batavia – This is a very old restaurant right on the edge of Fatahillah Square in Kota Tua, the old town portion of Jakarta. To paraphrase my friend, Hemingway never came to Jakarta, but this is the sort of place which he would have frequented. I’d strongly recommend it for a drink, although we didn’t eat here so I can’t comment on the food.

Beautika – This is a more traditional Indonesian restaurant, and serves Manado cuisine (north Sulawesi). It’s spicy and funky, and generally delicious. You order from what looks like a buffet bar, and they then bring it to your table. The food doesn’t look like much, and the ambiance is non-existent, but the food was very good. They have a wide variety of juices, but I don't think they serve alcohol. I also tried bat for the first time, which was interesting. 

Prohibition – We didn’t make it here, because we had to wake up at 3 am the next day to fly to Bali, but I wanted to include it because it’s apparently a very cool speakeasy-type bar with great drinks. 

Lara Djonggrang – My friend who lives in Jakarta says that this is the Indonesian restaurant she takes all of her friends to, in part because it’s pan-Indonesian, so you can taste your way across the archipelago. It also, in her words, makes you feel like Lara Croft as you enter the restaurant. It’s a very cool space. 

We went here unsupervised as our friend had a work event over lunch, but we ordered very specifically based on her suggestions. And her suggestions were very necessary as the menu is freaking huge, and I had basically no familiarity with Indonesia cuisine before this trip. They unhelpfully don’t have their menu online, but we ordered a beef satay (served on a comically large platter that featured three large conch shells in which they had the stay, the sauce, and something else I can’t remember), a delicious oxtail soup, Rendang Padang (which was by far the best rendang I’ve ever had), Nasi Kajongan Wayan (a Balinese rice dish with duck, vegetables, coconut, eggs, seafood salad, and of course sambal), and something else that escapes me. This was our favorite meal in Jakarta.

[Mark Dedrick]

Yogyakarta

Yogyakarta, which can be shorted to Yogya (and pronounced Jogja, and per the t-shirts I saw for sale can be spelled any damn way you please), is the cultural center of Java. I’d never heard of it before doing research for this trip, but it’s quite large (around 4 million in the metro area, which is extremely sprawling). We came to Yogya for one reason, to visit the temples at Borobudur and Prambanam, and it was totally worth it for those reasons.

Lodging – At the recommendation of our friends, and confirmed by our guidebook, we stayed at the Phoenix Hotel. It’s a Sofitel, and is in a beautiful 100 year-old building, and you can book it for like $60 a night. I’d highly recommend it. The hotel is nice, and the staff are incredible.

Transportation – Cabs are cheap. I think the cab from our hotel to the airport was something like 30,000 rupiah, which is just over $2. We got ripped off going from the airport to our hotel, and paid something like 100,000 rupiah, which is like $8. (as an aside, the exchange rate right now is about 13,000 Indonesian rupiah per one US Dollar, which makes calculating price on the fly slightly challenging, although I got much better at dividing by 13,000 by the end of the trip) You can also hire a rickshaw for a negotiated price, which we did one day as we were trying to navigate around the city and didn’t see any cabs. Given my earlier comments on traffic in Indonesia (Yogya is nowhere near as bad as Jakarta, but the same lack of rules and number of motorcycles applies) this is a slightly frightening proposition, and our guy would simply pedal directly into any intersection we can to, just trusting that the cars and motorcycles would go around us. Which they did.

Sights - Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and it’s one of the coolest and most impressive things I’ve ever seen in my life. We had a limited amount of time here, so we booked a tour through Smailing Tours for Borobudur and Prambanan in one day. It wasn’t the cheapest quote we got (ended up being around $100 per person for a ten hour tour, inclusive of everything, including admission to the sites, a driver, an English-speaking tour guide, breakfast and lunch) but they did a fantastic job and I’d recommend them. If you're staying at the Phoenix they also have an office in the hotel, which is also convenient. We did sunrise at Borobudur, which was pretty spectacular. We arrived at the temple a bit before 5 am, and hiked up to the top where we hung out and watched it slowly get lighter and lighter. It also had the added benefit of allowing us to complete touring the temple before the big tour buses and such showed up around 8 am.

I don’t really have words to describe the temple. Just incredible, beautiful, and massive. I’m really happy we went.

On any other trip, Prambanan would have been the highlight. Prambanan is a Hindu temple compound, like Borobudur built in the 9^th century. Borobudur is about 40 minutes north of Yogyakarta while Prambanam is about 11 miles east of the city. Words will fail me on this as well, but it’s gorgeous and incredible. The complex is so huge, there are so many buildings, and yet there are also so many more buildings that they’re in the process of restoring. Breathtaking.

In addition to these two sites we also spent a portion of another day wandering around the city. The main drag, Malioboro Street, is pretty cool. There are a ton of shops and vendors, and a lot of warungs, or small food spots, lining it, and particularly at night it was fun to walk along it. We visited the Kraton, or Sultan’s Palace, and it was fine. There is, however, apparently some sort of dispute among the royal family, and as a result there are two entrances to the Kraton. We only found one of them, and that portion of the family only gets you access to some stuff that’s outside of the physical palace.

Another thing that Indonesia in general, and Yogyakarta in particular, are known for is Batik, which is a traditional form of Indonesian artwork, typically represented as either a painting or fabric or clothing. We visited two Batik workshops, Batik Winotosastro and Plentong Batik. Winotosastro was very cool. They gave us a quick tour of their (operational) facility, and we got to see how Batik was made. You can, apparently, sign up for a class where you make your own Batik, and go through the entire process, which sounds pretty cool. We also purchased some shirts, scarves and fabric.

[Mark Dedrick]

Yogyakarta - Food

Yogyakarta is the city we didn’t quite figure out the food scene. We didn’t have bad food, per se (or at least not much), but we didn’t have anything absolutely spectacular.

Gudeg Bu Lies – Gudeg is probably the signature dish of Yogyakarta, and there are places all over serving it. Immediately east of the Kraton, on JL. Wijilan, are a ton of gudeg spots, one next to another. We ended up at Gudeg Bu Lies because I’d read about it somewhere, and we just liked the look of it. I’d never heard of Gudeg prior to this trip, but on its own it consists of unripe jackfruit boiled with sugar, coconut milk and a bunch of spices. It’s typically served with rice, egg, tempeh, chicken, and sambel goring krechek, which is a beef skin stew. It was good, but a bit sweet for my taste.

Oxen Free – This is a beer garden located just off of Malioboro. It looked very cool, and we were excited to sit for a bit (we’d walked around 15 miles at that point in the day), have a beer and a small snack. While the space is very cool, their beer selection consisted solely of Bintang (ubiquitous in Indonesia), Bintang Radler and Bali Hai. Which did the job, but wasn’t particularly interesting. The food was very mediocre.

Paprika – This was the restaurant at our hotel. Our first night staying there we decided to eat at the hotel for simplicity’s sake. We were quite tired, we didn’t really know the city, and we had to get up at 3:30 am the following morning. Unbeknownst to us, it’s a buffet every night, and was probably the worst meal we had our entire time on the trip. We did try a quite nice bottle of Balinese syrah, which was cool.

Bedhot Resto – Our second night in Yogya we knew we didn’t want to eat at the hotel again, but we still had very little in the way of reliable recommendations. So we ended up at this place, located just off of Malioboro. It’s an art gallery, a hotel, and I think a tattoo parlor, located down this very narrow alley. It was populated mostly by backpackers, and had a very interesting vibe. The Bintangs were cold, the food was solid (Nasi Goreng, eggplant curry, fried tempeh, and lumpia) and the whole thing, including drinks, was about $15 for two people. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was good, and interesting, and I’d recommend it.

The bar at the Phoenix – I’ll put a quick plug in for Vino, the bar in the Phoenix. From 5-7 (I think) they have a happy hour, and the price of an extremely solid martini during that time is approximately $3.50. They also have a signature drink, the gin sling, which is also quite good.

[Tweaked]

Great write up!  Thanks Mark.