(Excerpted from Tom's travel journals of the 1990s, this one while he was living in Guam and traveling to Jakarta on business.)

       It's HOT, it's HUMID, it's...ta da...Jakarta! Let me explain where Jakarta is for those who, like me, have forgotten their high school World Geography classes. Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia which consists of a very large number of islands including Sumatra, Java, Eastern New Guinea and Bali among about a thousand more. When the world was being explored and Columbus was looking for a route to the "spice islands" he could have asked me. That's Indonesia.

            My first impression of Jakarta is the hustle, bustle, blaring horns, rumpled buses (looks like these double-deckers have been rolled!) and  the pollution.  There's a blue-gray haze over the city and most of the cars and buses and little three-wheel jitney's appear to contribute. All of the attention to detail was not easy considering I was looking while holding on for dear life while the driver, honked, swerved, road the line and generally only paid attention to the direction traffic was moving! Although lane lines are painted, no one pays them any attention so a three lane road can have as many as seven cars abreast! And yet in the time I spent there, I saw no accidents.  Most cars and other vehicles were at least dented, if not downright wrinkled, so accidents do happen.

            Every once in a while I would see a cross walk but for the most part people crossed where they pleased and dodged traffic. I understand that there are lots of pedestrian accidents although everyone I saw was pretty adroit at avoiding bumpers. Since no one pays much attention to road lines (except as a nice guide to center you car over, or weave back and forth across), there were lots of places without any at all, particularly around some very large roundabouts (traffic circles). It makes an interesting traffic pattern to see a circular street wide enough for ten cars, with five of those trying to cross in front of the other five. The drivers don't try to get into the turn lane in plenty of time, they wait until it's time, then turn across however many lanes of traffic required to get where they want to go.

            Since I am interested in things culinary, my timing was good because they are celebrating "spice week" so one of the hotel restaurants has daily buffets featuring different traditional Indonesian dishes each day. They tend to be hot and spicy, using chilies and curry, but some are not so fiery and many use coconut milk and pineapple along with ingredients I cannot recognize (except the goat carcass they had roasted and were carving up) by sight or taste. One of my favorites is Satay. Thin strips of beef or chicken, skewered on bamboo and charcoal grilled then dipped into a spicy peanut sauce. 

            On Sunday we traveled by tour bus to the highlands, stopping along the way to travel through a Safari Park. Not unlike those we have in the US although we were VERY close to the lions when we drove through. Close enough that you could smell the heavy, musky odor that thickened the air. We stopped to see some animals up-close and personal, so I took the opportunity to have my picture taken with an Orangutang! He was a little guy and seemed to like me the way he hung all over me, where with other people he had just draped his arm across their shoulders. Wrong day to wear white pants!

            Lunch was at a restaurant on the top of a mountain where the slopes were covered with Indian tea, long trails throughout and people in the large, round straw hats the Chinese wear as they tended the tea bushes. 

            On the return trip we stopped and walked through a botanical garden of over 240 hectares that contained one of the presidential palaces. Our guide was capable of quoting the scientific names of everything we observed and telling us what the plants were used for if anything. Here is where many spice plants live and although it isn't the growing season, you could, for example, crush a fallen leaf from a clove tree and certainly smell the cloves. I was unaware too that Rattan grew as a thick, flexible vine, hanging sometimes one or two hundred feet down out of the tree canopy. They are very malleable when green and so that is the time to form them into furniture, then let them dry and harden.

            The backcountry is likely more representative of Indonesia than is Jakarta. The roads and streets are lined with people and most lovely of all to a fruit and vegetable starved person from Guam, extremely long fruit and vegetable stands literally bulging with fresh stuff!   Some of the stands stretched for 100-200 feet and there were banana bunches up to several feet long, hanging nearly side-by-side for the entire length. More bananas than I have ever seen in my life.  You can buy about five pounds of tree-ripened banana's for 1500 Rupiahs, which isn't much. We ate many that day.  It takes 2028 Rupiahs to equal one dollar so that's pretty cheap fruit. Mandarin oranges, purchased where they are grown cost about one dollar for 10 kilo's (about 22 lbs). The vegetables difficult to obtain and expensive, are the cold-weather stuff like cauliflower and broccoli. No cold weather there you see.

            Indonesia is a true third-world country trying very hard to emerge as a modern society. They are making great strides but you still see people squatting on a rock in the middle of a river to do their thing rather than find a toilet. Lots of poverty in evidence but no starvation that I could see. The land is too rich in food plants and animals for that to happen. Many houses are very western in style, although they tend to be narrow and long rather than square. But many more house are of the traditional style where they appear to be mostly roof.  By that I mean that a roof is erected that begins about two feet from the dirt and extends quite high, while covering a large area. When it rains, which it does nearly daily, the mud splatters around the open edges of the roof. The inside floor is just hard-packed earth. The residents take their shoes off before entering...if they wear shoes.

            This would be a great place to spend some vacation time just exploring, particularly Bali!

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