By Jullie Y. Daza
CAUGHT in traffic on Holy Thursday on a toll road, when what should have been a 45-minute trip turned into a crawl that took three and a half hours to negotiate.
It happened in Jakarta, the largest city in Southeast Asia, population 10 million. Compared to our traffic jams, this was much worse. “Our” traffic snarls are more or less predictably confined to EDSA and C-5, but out there in JKT, even the narrowest streets are jammed at all hours, but more so when everyone but everyone is in a rush to leave, enjoy a long weekend. Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, but in the same way that we have two Muslim holidays, Good Friday is a national holiday over there in deference to the Christian minority.
Said the “bodyguard” assigned to us, “Traffic is Jakarta’s No. 1 problem. No. 2 is flooding.” Hard to believe that the streets get flooded when the rain pours. For, unlike Metro Manila, every square inch of Jakarta is covered with trees, their foliage providing shade and beauty, a touch of living nature in a country that is no longer considered Third World. The trees are grandly, plentifully, conspicuously ubiquitous. From the time the visitor steps down from the plane to walk to the terminal, he is greeted by the sight of neatly trimmed gardens on both sides of the corridor, a fortuitous sign of more green to come.
Where else but in JKT would one see billboards advertising still pictures and videos of trees and forests, without words, strategically distributed along the highways, among the trees?
Like Metro Manila, JKT is full of malls big and small, with more new ones coming up. Like Metro Manila, the capital of Indonesia has more than one Chinatown. According to Bodyguard, “the richest people in Indonesia are Chinese people.” They own malls, for one thing. JKT is so large that it is divided into a quadrant based on the four directions: North, South, East, West.
Like Metro Manila, they have a version of Nayong Pilipino called Taman Mini, a 250 ha park hosting 34 buildings to represent the architecture and culture of 34 provinces. The park was built by Mrs. Suharto when she was first lady of Indonesia. The difference between their Taman Mini and our Nayong Pilipino? Ours is a memory awaiting fullbodied resurrection.
