Adventures of Isabel

Jakarta’s 800-year-old port. Still a working cargo port, Sunda Kelapa only allows piring, traditional two-masted sailing ships.

Cargo is still loaded manually. Interestingly (though not terribly surprisingly) most of the workers in the port and on the ships are Bugis — the seafaring ethnic group that earned notoriety in the English language as “Bogeymen.”

I felt [...]

Procrastinate. Everything is more fun at the last minute, right? Plus, you’ve got the election and the bomb and the odd spot of food poisoning to attend to.
Gather the requisite documents: a sponsorship letter, photocopies of your passport and visa. Proof you do actually plan to leave the country relatively soon can’t hurt [...]

I had a chance to escape from the office for a few hours yesterday and accompany friends from Voice of Human Rights Media to Klender, a kampung in East Jakarta. They were shooting footage for a documentary about efforts to provide kampung youth with basic legal training to protect themselves and their neighbors against [...]

Despite warnings from police that Jakarta might face election riots, today’s vote seems to have gone quietly in the city, with all exit polls showing incumbent president SBY giving the competition a solid trouncing.

A man shows his inked finger — proof he voted in today’s presidential election — as he leaves a polling station in [...]

Gado-Gado vendor in BenHil, Jakarta. On a heated stone, he mixes together peanut, citrus, sugar, chili, and your choice of vegetables, rice cakes, tofu and tempeh to make a delicious lunch.

Hallway of a Rumah Kost in Tebet, Jakarta.

I’m settled into a room now, thanks to the kind and patient help of my friends here.   It’s humbling how quickly traveling to an unfamiliar place renders me completely dependent on the goodwill of others.

It’s a bit like being a small child.  My Indonesian is sufficient to convey basic information and hold simple conversations, but [...]

Ibu Kurniati
On May 28, 2006, Ibu Kurniati’s world exploded.“For us, it was like a small apocolypse. We saw huge fires, and the hot mud, and the strong smell of gas was everywhere,”
The previous day, natural gas prospectors Lapindo Brantas hit something soft while drilling nearly 3 km below the surface in East Java. [...]

Irham, Jakarta
Bush has never been a popular figure in Indonesia — a Muslim country with a strong history of anti-imperial struggle (notwithstanding of course, its own colonial adventures in East Timor and Papua) — and his re-election ensured that dislike of Bush would extend to the American people.
Recently, though, it’s once again become cool to [...]