Down on the farm in Central Jakarta

It’s been almost four years now since I took this show on the road from Canada’s Wet Coast to steaming Java and what’s curious and refreshing is that despite the amount of time I’ve spent wandering the streets of New Jak City there’s always something new and interesting just ‘round the next bend.
Take the other day.
One of the few luxuries my budget allowed a couple of years back was buying a (daylight) membership to Quantum, a swank Kuningan gym seven stories above the clock that marks time – often correctly – above the gleaming lobby of the space age Menara Imperium tower. Its one of those towers with a revolving bar/resto above, three floors of valet parking beneath, and a workforce of hundreds of $40/month young men and women whose only job is to buff and shine the scuffmarks and greasy fingerprints on the chrome and mirrored elevators.
I’ve a hate-hate relationship with gyms. I’ll hit the weight stack hard for four months and then sit back and eat donuts and drink Bintang lager until my Calvins start leaving red bands of ring-around-the-gut and I try to find reasons to avoid wearing lace-up shoes, at which point I roll of the sofa long enough to waddle down to settle my mounting, long-overdue monthly bill and drag my sorry ass back to Quantum.
What I like best about the joint – besides the awesome, paint-stripping hot showers - is that there’s usually no one there but a couple of hatchet-faced Indonesian trophy wives and myself, so I don’t get all neurotic about stuff and feel like I have to count sit-ups out loud for the benefit of the anabolic warrior grumbling about the Universal set only going to 360 pounds: Y’know: “One – two – three – four – sixty eight – sixty nine etc etc”. I’m psychically fragile enough to do something like that.
So I’m back at it no more than a month now, motivated by the need to knock off at least one pant size and be able to hustle my way across five kms of Iraqi desert with a 20 kg pack on my back (laptop, sat-phone, camera, ½ dozen MREs, water and a carton of smokes: war-zone necessities) should it become necessary. Here’s news: if the war started tomorrow and I had to “run” anywhere, I might be able to make it to the buffet line at the Amman Sheraton without expiring. No excuses but the double malaria whammy back in Nov. continues to poison me and even a middling 12 minute jog leaves me heaving.
One of the features of the view from the rowing machines on the north side of Quantum, in addition to a cityscape that unfolds towards the Java Sea somewhere beyond the stacks of the electrical plants, is the water-filled building site next door, the collection of sheet metal and cardboard that passes for home for perhaps a dozen families along the earthen berm formed by the concrete forms of the construction site and the gaggle of kids and adults FISHING inside the building. The first time I saw it I did a quicky news feature about the fate of Jakarta’s poor and learned there’s a local cop who comes by and stocks the ‘pond’ – which is actually like seven stories deep – and charges the equivalent of five cents to fish. Sadly, three kids under the age of nine drowned there one day a couple of weeks ago.
This week, my workout routine happens to take me to the south side of the building and what do I see spread out below my feet and directly across from the tower and its chi-chi revolving restaurant but several acres of hand-plowed fields of vegetables on lands I assume were slated for development but have been left unattended since the currency tanked a few years back. And, I’m not talking about your cheesy little urban gardens ‘reclaimed’ from inner-city moonscapes such as were all the rage among neighborhood activists in N. America a few years back.
Funny thing is that I know those fields were not there a couple of months ago but they’ve a lived in, well worked look about ‘em that suggests whoever is responsible for them is planning to be there for while.
Thing is, here you’ve got folks fishing in a building site next door to red soil fields of carrots and corn literally 100 paces off one of the principal five-lane-in-each-direction thoroughfares lined with 15-storey office complexes, dead center in an Asian city of 10 million. I thought that was pretty cool.
Better yet, when later I walked south down Jl. Rasuna Said – that main drag mentioned above – I found a building I recall was dumped a couple of years ago after the owners defaulted on their loans and fled for their Singapore penthouses, which is slowly being reclaimed by nature. While its neighbors – including PriceWaterhouse Coopers by the way, part of the same gang of Armani-clad thieves and colluders who signed off on all those audited financial statements for all those bankrupt companies and lending institutions back in the day – continue to thrive behind armies of security guards, the gardens in front of this particular property are as dense and overgrown as Erika Badu’s afro. Vines the thickness of your wrist snake their way through the steel and plastic corporate logo while the first floor of the once-white eight-storey affair slowly disappear behind what like mutant Jurassic marsh grasses and shaggy palms.
Gotta love it. Just when you think that maybe all the life has been sucked out of the city, that its masses have finally been swept away by the mounting sewage-fed floodwaters, paved over or driven out by developers for whom arson is a popular means to an end, you stumble upon these wonderful life-affirming moments and perhaps cautionary tales of the impermanence of it all deep in the smelly heart of the Big Durian.

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Today’s “vanilla” offering unloads all the dirt you ever wanted about the Bush clan, everything from Dad’s circle-jerking frat days to his inebriated daughters’ brushes with the law, info about Dubya’s business holdings, and brother Jeb’s repeated cover-ups of family members running afoul of the law down in Florida etc etc. Check it out: