Indonesia - Jakarta via Changi
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We flew to Jakarta with a transit of several hours in Changi (Singapore), so had time to visit the butterfly house at the airport.
Then on to Jakarta.
Ahh, yes. Not our favourite place. The hotel was fine, the area was fine, but the city was charmless, with no
redeeming features. Three nights was simply too long to spend there. We think that there may be some interesting places to go in Jakarta, but they were too far away from where we were staying; taking a taxi would cost about the same as two nights at the hotel we were staying at and, given the chaotic traffic the trip would probably take more than an hour each way.
We walked through quite a lot of the city, mainly in central Jakarta and to the south. Monas, the big tourist attraction, did nothing for us. The area had few eating places that appealed and eventually we resorted to Starbucks - that is a true indictment of the city!
We had read about a huge fabric outlet, and walked rather a long way to go and find it, only to discover it wasn't a fabric place but a multi-story, multi-building chothing warehouse, the likes of which we had never seen before, with hundreds of shops, and people bundling up clothing to ship off to other parts of the world.
Jakarta is a classic city of rich and poor. Some parts were positively squalid, but we could walk to a shopping mall with guards on the doors and only the top international fashion and jewelry brands inside. Mind you, the malls were beautifully air-conditioned, and we succumbed to their allure.
On the day we were to fly out our plane didn't leave until 6:40 in the evening, but we elected to go and catch the train out to the quiet airport as soon as we checked out in the morning, rather than trying to explore more of Jakarta.
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