After another fitful night of sleep at the compound, we indulged in our now standard breakfast of Paraherbs, corn flakes topped with nuts and berries, and extra-crispy toast.

Our first stop for the day was to be the Istiqlal Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia and the headquarters for the entire Indonesian mosque system. The building loomed in a most majestic and brutal way.

At the door we were scanned by a metal detector and asked to remove our shoes. We were met soon after entering by a woman of ambiguous age dressed in a flowing and completely unrevealing outfit of matching brown silk garments, including an elaborate head scarf. She showed us to a room  with a large wooden desk where I signed the guest book. “You are students of Islam,” Jackson explained, and so we were.

After signing the guest book, the four of us left together, strolling barefoot on the cool marble floors. The entire mosque was well ventilated and ornate. With both gentle breeze and plenty of natural light pouring though the perforated walls of the building, it was cool and pleasant inside. As we strolled, the muezzin was warming up to sing the call to prayer. As we strolled, our guide kept a running narrative and invited questions. “This is one of the hardest passages of the Quran to sing,” Jackson translated. “Today the mosque will get about 10,000 visitors. On Indonesian Independence day, that number rises to 200,000.

The building was huge, but with 200,000 people it must be a madhouse. We strolled past a giant cart full of welded steel donation boxes, toward the ancillary praying areas. These were tiled with hundreds and hundreds of little plots cordoned off and facing Mecca, for the use of people during prayer times. We also visited a great wooden drum, a gift from the president of Indonesia, and used for certain, more conspicuous calls to prayer.  The drum is carved out of a single tree and stretched on both sides with cow hide.  Javanese script adorns its side, and it hangs in a frame covered in intricate woodworking.

On our way out of the Mosque, we were ushered into the office once again, to retrieve the shoes and to make a donation. After some inner calculus, Jackson determined the appropriate donation to be 5,000 rupiah (about 50 cents each). It seemed she was expecting more, since she had been for much of the tour explaining to us how hip her daughter was, bragging about the number of facebook and twitter relationships she held, and explaining how her daughter would enjoy socially networking with us. But upon receipt of the donation, she became silent, and merely motioned us toward the door.

On our way back to the car, we took a detour across the street to a large Catholic church which stood dwarfed by the mosque. Our time in the church was short, and much less pleasant. The large stone building full of smokey candles seemed to amplify the sticky Jakarta heat and the dimly lit place felt somehow simultaneously claustrophobic and deserted. The courtyard outside was quite nice though with a number of fountains and plenty of the lush tropical vegetation which Jakarta seems unable to pave over, try as it may.

We hopped back in Jackson’s car and proceeded to a nearby hotel and spa for a 10-dollar massage. This is likely one of the most expensive massages in the city, but well worth the investment. An hour later we walked away from the building feeling supremely relaxed and rather starving. To deal with the starving situation, we piled once again into Jackson’s car. By now it was threatening to rain, and in the time it took us to exit the lot, the threat was mad good. A hammering torrent and large raindrops drummed on the roof of our Kijang, drowning out the Indonesian pop music on the radio.

For lunch, we visited a Padang restaurant. Padang is an interesting style of food service. In lieu of the normal menu and ordering process, the entire menu is simply served to you right then and there in a delightful steaming tower of dishes. The customer is invited to eat what he or she will of those dishes and is charged only for the plates that were sampled. We sampled quite a few, and were rather surprised at the bill, which by Indonesian standards was gargantuan, and by western standards was, well, standard.

Below, a special piece of fried beef lung.

Refueled and refreshed, we headed back to the residence after a cup of coffee in a small cafe tucked away in the Benhil neighborhood.  The rain was just letting up.

In Jakarta it is a common phenomenon to find it raining in one part of the city and merely just humid in another. “It is very likely,” explained Jackson, “that it is still raining at the Padang restaurant.”

Cool, we thought, and mounted the cycles.

The wheel was short but fantastic. We went in search of the terrible traffic jam that had been promised the first day, and find it we did.

By now we were all getting very good at wheeling in Jakarta. We wove confidently through the streams of vehicles and found it very easy to communicate with fellow travelers to gain access to streams of traffic we were interested in.

As we approached the financial district the sun began to set and the sky blazed with a tremendous orange and red sunset, which reflected off the many skyscrapers which pierced the skyline. As the sunset blossomed into full effect, we found ourselves in very lightly trafficed set of roads encircling a large central stadium. We executed long slaloms through the warm air, enjoying the freedom of the open road and the glorious colors which were slowing fading into the many palms that lined the stadium road.

Feeling like men who had discovered a deck filled only with aces, we wheeled around and through the stadium, by children playing soccer, and athletes who were executing a peculiar training technique, involving climbing up the ticket booths and hanging from the walls in bizarrely splayed positions.

Jackson took bishop and brought us to a golf course which somehow had found its way into the city center. He called a waypoint, and we strolled into the clubhouse and purchased some water. We strolled the course and drank our water as the last bits of sunlight left the sky, replaced by silhouettes and the faint clapping sound of hundreds of bats in flight.

That evening we feasted with Jackson’s extended family at a fantastic Chinese seafood restaurant in a  local shopping mall. The journey to the mall would have been a 15-minute wheel, but we chose to take the car and driver, since Jackson’s sister was accompanying us. This turned out to be the wrong move, as the recent rain had induced a horrific traffic jam or simply “jam” as they refer to it in Jakarta. The journey of only a few miles took us nearly an hour, and by the time we arrived the entire family appeared to be preparing to gnaw on their own arms.

I must take a break here to comment on shopping malls in Jakarta. They play a huge role, as gathering places for the more affluent citizens, and are to be found in great abundance all over the city. Jakartian malls dwarf all but the more gargantuan American malls, and sport many floors with luxury goods, expensive restaurants, and playgrounds for children.  As air-conditioned panopticons, they provide refuge from the sweltering humidity of the city in a see-and-be-seen world of look-alike strangers.

This one we were dining in was no exception, and after dinner we took a stroll. It seemed almost incomprehensible that this level of luxury and consumerism could coexist with the boiling overcrowded streets, 10-cent meals, and poverty-stricken slums which were to be found right outside.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 11:52 am and is filed under Asia, Indonesia, Pictures, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.