Letters from.Jakarta: All I Want is the Air that You Breathe...

Well, it's Day 3 in the current city I find myself in. I've begun to get a feel for its rhythms, sights and smells. One word sums up the sights and smells department actually: polluted. My son is right; you wouldn't want to come to Jakarta and stay there. This is a very strange city, definitely trying its best to emerge as a modern city and not quite getting 'it'. More about what 'it' means in a bit.

First the pollution. OMG. I mean, O.M.G. It is bad. The Ancient Romans really had it sussed when they built roads as a first step to their megalomania, which I now understand is an old word for globalisation. Without roads, nothing can happen. Concrete, tarmac, even shingle - that's the way to progress. Jakarta, despite its growing forests of power towers sticking their glass and chrome heads above the poverty of red tiled kampung dwellings, does not have a road or transport system that works. There are roads, but they go all over the place, in a half baked attempt to service a pseudo Western metropolis. There are lane markings sometimes, not that anyone pays any attention to them. There's much driving on the hard shoulder and overtaking from the blind side. Some roads have added long bollards along the lane markings - I guess to reinforce the fact that "No no, you mustn't cross this line. Really." Again, largely ignored and negotiated around. Some overpasses have been half built and abandoned. Apparently with one particularly crucial overhead roadway the Japanese had given money as investment to build, but a corrupt government had whittled that away into private pockets, so the construction is left just hanging incomplete, while congestion runs rampant below at ground zero.

The fact that there are too many cars just compounds the problem. My son tells me that "No one walks." But not everyone owns a car, unless you were the wealthy, in which case, you would own more than one vehicle. There are poorly maintained and crowded local buses. And mini buses in which you would sit cheek by jowl with sweaty others, bumping along with the side door wide open so someone could jump off at any given moment when they've reached their destination. No trams, trains or tube. No idiot would pedal cycle either. You could opt for a dangerous ride on a motorbike taxi, but you truly risk life and limb then; and for ladies, you get up close and personal to strange men. Ermm...well...um...NO. My son's only objection is having to wear a greasy helmet they wold provide you with. Euww, that's just, echh.

So what you have are too many congested roads with too many cars coming at you left right and centre. They like biggish cars, mainly small 4 x 4s, and they love motorbikes. The combo is lethal in terms of trying to cross a road, and in terms of your poor respiratory system. Last night Number One Son (and only son) decided that he and I would do a return journey walk for an hour to get our dinner, because it would still beat the traffic had we gone for a cab ride. He did warn me not to trust paving slabs, because they move, wobble, and sometimes disappear altogether. I was told not to wear anything nice on my feet, just flip flops so I could hose down afterwards. Oh I loved that thought... And Mum, mind out for the cockroaches. I thrilled to that too. So we hopped, skipped and jumped the half hour to Joy King Duck Restaurant, then back, laden with Joy King Duck. I literally kept my nose to the ground, watching for emerging vermin, mobile concrete, ditch water from the day's earlier thunderburst (that was something to watch safely indoors at a Starbucks...), following in son's footprints, at moments literally when it was muddy. I even did a spot of tightrope style balancing act when called to skim along the pavement edge; miss it and you fall either into mud puddles on the safe side, or oncoming motorbike traffic on the unsafe side, from behind. Safe and unsafe I think, was academic. I thought to myself: this is like Hong Kong in the 60s when I was a child growing up, and the city was becoming the metropolis that is is now. That says it all about what age Jakarta really is as a city: there is a long way to go for them to fully come into the 21st century.

The trek was one thing. I can handle treks and puddle jumping like the Vicar of Dibley. But the emission fumes from the myriad myriad carburetor engines roaring around me assaulted my nostrils, and clung about my face as though I was wearing a plastic bag around my head. I gagged, choked, spluttered like the best of them. I felt surely I was blackened inside and out by the end of the hour. The back of my throat and nasal passages felt grimy, singed. My tongue burned.

Transport is a bane for city dwellers. Until they sort this one out, life will not be attractive within city limits, and the only reason to live here is for the sake of the money one would earn in order to move away and live somewhere else.

As for the other factors that make or break a modern city's success as such. It has much to do with the mentality and social attitudes of the people who make up the city's population. The visual analogy of high rises standing incongruously amongst poor dwellings and endless mosques is an indication of how inculturation has not worked. The West simply cannot plonk glass and chrome, enough Starbucks and McDonalds, edamame and California Rolls, sell Samsung Galaxy androids and iPhonegadzillions, or peddle WhatsApp, Google and other IT ideologies - and magically turn a place instantly into a world city. The local culture is of a completely different pace altogether. This is the Tropics, land resting on equatorial lines and rumbling beneath with earth tremors. It is a jungle rhythm, with pagan spirits very much alive somewhere in the belly of the land, and local traditions, colours and a raison d'étrê that is a completely other creature. The place is earthed. Each day, the fire from the land rises until the air is so charged with heat it has to disperse in thunderstorms, washing away the pressure and redressing the ion charged air. It is nature's self regulatory cleansing system.

Weather interruptions and a contrary rural spirit doesn't walk along well with 21st century city notions. Bad weather disrupts, blocks bad traffic, seizes up the rhythm of modern living, washes out coiffure and streams mascara, ruins Jimmy Choos. In the countryside, one would simply stop tilling the soil, take temporary refuge under a giant banana leaf, offer up a thanksgiving prayer for the rain that waters the dry parched earth. And when the rainstorm passes, one would pad, barefoot, back out onto rich alluvial soil and continue planting, growing life to sustain Life. It's a simple life, filled with rice, fish, halal meat, prayer five times a day and an agricultural cycle which feeds folklore, woodcraft and song at harvest times.

The local religion is a major factor. Islam is a way of life, a way of thought and of being. There is significant moral censorship on television programmes and foreign films. It explains the non-Western attitudes in city circles what is considered as immature approaches to human relating. Petty jealousies can result, and overdwelling on inconsequentials; not because of any innate nastiness, it is but a playing out of incompatible ways of being - contradictions of acceptable belief and behaviour. The true Indonesian psyche is conservative, demure. Rural. Modern go-getting grates against that.

As things stand, the five times daily prayer criers seem to lament from the many minarets the inconsistency of clashing cultures within Jakarta city. "Help God, Help! We don't know how to live!" I write these thoughts, sitting in the smoking area of a local coffee shop that vends civet cat regurgitated coffee (honest to God!), looking out of smoked glass - literally? - at endless streams of Toyota Avanzas and assorted minor motors, waiting for the inevitable cleansing lightning storm to strike around midday, in a vain attempt to wash away the grime of human civility gone slightly awry.

Excuse me, gotta dash. The guys blowing ciggy smoke at me from the next table is killing me. More next time.
This is Andrée Lee, gagging on cigarette and leaded petrol fumes, reporting from Indonesia. Wish you were here, but you probably wouldn't wanna come now.