It is worth a moment here to digress and mention the quite integral role that coffee plays in the AsiaWheeling lifestyle. It seems, dear reader, that during our first few days in Jakarta, we had somehow forgotten this.

Shortly after our arrival, you see, the illustrious Mr. Jackson Fu had disclosed to us that he was somewhat of a recovering cafinist (unfortunately a common trait among the AsiaWheeling board of advisors). Not long after we first met, I remember him mentioning that during university, it was not uncommon for the illustrious fellow to consume the elixir in truly vast quantities with his Italian flatmate, resulting in what he described as a furious nervous energy, erring on palpitous, which he found quite counter productive. Since then, he’s switched over to drinking two liters of orange juice every morning, which we can only imagine produces a similar effect.  Out of respect for this fact, we had been consuming just one small cup of joe in the mornings. This dosage proved effective in staving off “the zombies,” and preventing debilitating headaches, but I dare say both Scott and I found some component of our reality to be lacking.

Nearing the end of our time in Jakarta, we finally began to increase the coffee consumption towards the normal 2-3 cups per day and found ourselves experiencing an alarming increase in lucidity as well as general voltage. Indeed our enjoyment of life grew from an already respectable level, to a truly magnificent elation. Calls of “highway speeds” become much more common and the general pace of wheeling increased.

And I might as well digress further to draw your attention to Indonesian coffee, and specifically how delightful it is. If traditionally prepared, it is a cousin of the Turkish/Armenian/Greek variant, featuring a luxurious sludge at the bottom of each cup, but is generally served in much larger quantities than those more European brews. While we have found milk to be a rare addition, sugar is added quite liberally (too liberal for our taste). The coffee itself is quite fresh, as evidenced by a deep golden crema lacing the top of the brew, and produced locally. Many attribute the nickname “java” to refer to the indonesian island of Java, which your humble correspondents are right now quite happily traversing by rail.

You may be thinking, “is this coffee occurrence merely a mislabeled effect of the jet lag wearing off? Or was it really that coffee has this wonderful power, to bring the extremes of experience more easily within reach? I dare say the truth lies somewhere in between… but one thing which cannot be denied is that as we venture further into the journey, we cannot count on such delightful abundance of this very important liquid. So until we must turn to Nescafe powders once again, Indonesia, we raise our glass to you.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 3:23 am and is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.