Breakfast For One
A Visit To Jakarta’s Café Batavia
8:15am, Jakarta’s Old City. The streets are filled with sights and sounds characteristic of this place: motorbikes, industrial cranes, roti carts. The city is suffocated by the exhaust of a million idling commuters, casting an orange-brown haze over the whole country. Still, there is a unique energy to Indonesia’s capital that you cannot find anywhere else, and it is on full display this morning.
Nearby, a lone American man sips a latte in the grand salon of a restored 19th century café. Once upon a time it was filled with the conversations of enterprising Dutch Colonists. Today, it is swallowed in silence. The man‘s only company is a whirring Mitsubishi air conditioner and a few dozen framed photos of celebrities and statesmen long departed.
The place is Cafè Batavia, and the man is me. The restaurant, I’d been told, is among Jakarta’s most famous, though it quickly became obvious that most of the local population has never been inside. The menu’s prices climb to western heights, and the café is only open to those who can pay them. A chalkboard sign outside the entrance has made it law.
By the time I realize what I’ve gotten into, it is too late to walk out. I’ve already ordered a latte, and the waitress has already disappeared into the kitchen. I’m locked in. For the past two weeks I’ve been traveling across Java and Bali on my own, but this is the first time I’ve felt alone. I resolve to finish my drink quickly so I can rejoin society outside.
Scenes like these are common in this city of 17 million. The people who call Jakarta home live at the intersection of urban decay and modernity, where crumbling buildings give way to lavish hotels and shopping malls with little notice. Fragile borders keep the two worlds separate, but just so. Upon arrival, you get a sense that this is a place that offers so much to the privileged, and so little to everyone else. It’s a familiar narrative.
Outside the capital these juxtapositions are much less stark, and easier to ignore. In the city they tower over you everywhere you go. For many backpackers Jakarta will be the final stop in Indonesia before flying home, and there are important lessons to draw from it. In many ways it is a city-sized commentary on the relationship between our world and theirs, and it isn’t an easy one to digest.
This is the Jakarta we built. It is the Jakarta we continue to build, at least for now.
