We settled into Batavia Marina, right inside the old Sunda Kelapa harbour complex. The marina building looked as though it had survived from another age: red brick, tall arches, dark wood, decorative panels, huge shells displayed almost like sculptures, and nautical objects scattered throughout the interior. Only later did I realise that this was exactly the effect the place was meant to create. The building was designed in a modern colonial style, deliberately echoing the old Batavia that once grew around this harbour.
From the water, the building dominated the marina, with its brick façade, terraces and a narrow tower rising beside it. At the top was an actual harbour light, a small lighthouse marking this part of Jakarta Harbour. Inside, the place felt less like an ordinary marina and more like an old maritime club: polished wood, elaborate decoration, large flower arrangements, display cases, and enormous shells that looked as though someone had brought half the ocean into the dining room.
The location made the whole thing even more appropriate. Sunda Kelapa had been one of the most important ports in this part of Java long before the Dutch arrived, and later became one of the main gateways into Batavia. For centuries, ships carrying spices, timber, textiles and goods from across the Indonesian archipelago passed through this waterfront. We had effectively tied our catamaran up in a place where much of Jakarta’s history had once arrived from the sea.
And then you walked through the marina gate.
A few minutes later, the polished wood, yachts and manicured grounds were gone, replaced by trucks, workers, canals, traffic and a completely different Jakarta.
Even the place where we were moored was already showing us what would become the defining feature of the city:
everything existed right next to everything else.
The Dutch East India Company, better known as the VOC – Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, was founded in 1602. On paper, it was a trading company, but it had powers that would be almost impossible to imagine in a private company today: it could maintain an army, build forts, sign treaties, send warships, and wage wars. In 1619, the Dutch took Jayakarta and began building Batavia in its place, which soon became the main headquarters of the VOC in Asia. From here, ships sailed toward the Moluccas for spices, toward India for textiles, and toward China and Japan for goods, while enormous quantities of all of it eventually made their way back to Europe.
The VOC did not exactly “rule the world,” but for a period its power went far beyond anything we normally associate with the word company. Trade was only the cleaner part of the story. Monopolies were often enforced by force, local rulers were pressured through treaties and military power, and behind the wealth flowing through Batavia there was a much less romantic story for the people who actually lived in this part of the world.
The Dutch even tried to turn Batavia into a kind of tropical Amsterdam. They cut the city with canals, built merchant houses, warehouses, and administrative buildings along them, and even today you can still recognise that old plan in the bridges and waterways. The problem was that tropical Jakarta was not Amsterdam. Heat, humidity, stagnant water, and poor sanitation turned many of the canals into breeding grounds for disease, and Batavia eventually earned a reputation as an extremely unhealthy place to live.
A few centuries later, the canals were still there.
Only the problem with what was flowing through some of them did not seem to have improved very much.
BATAVIA THAT STILL LIVES
The strongest traces of the old city remain in today’s Kota Tua, Jakarta’s historic centre. Around Fatahillah Square, colonial buildings immediately change the atmosphere of the city. There stands the former city hall of Batavia, today the Jakarta History Museum, from where the colonial administration once governed the city.
It is one of those places where history suddenly gains physical dimensions. Before you arrive, the VOC is just a name from a book. Then you are standing on the same square where, three hundred years ago, people were dealing with trade, administration, trials, politics, and the affairs of a company that had its own fleet and army.
Nearby stands the old Jakarta Kota railway station, another place where colonial architecture collides with modern Jakarta. In front of the building, motorcycles, buses, people carrying enormous sacks, street sellers, and taxis all move through one another in a system that looks from the outside as if it could not possibly work.
And yet it does.
Somehow.
Jakarta began showing us almost immediately that nothing here exists in only one version.
Jakarta is an enormous city — probably the largest I had ever been to up to that point. In 2018, Indonesia had around 270 million people, while more than ten million lived in Jakarta itself, and several times that number in the wider metropolitan area. Those figures sound abstract until you step outside and see what it actually means when that many people are packed into one urban space.
The city seems to have no end. Wherever you look there are skyscrapers, apartment blocks, construction sites, multi-level roads, and an endless spread of houses disappearing into the haze. Jakarta still has one of the largest concentrations of high-rise buildings in Asia, and even back in 2018 the pace of construction was extraordinary. From any elevated point, it is difficult to see where the city actually stops.
The traffic figures are even more impressive — or disturbing. In 2018, Jakarta had around 18.8 million registered motor vehicles, including more than 15 million motorcycles and roughly 3 million passenger cars. So that river of scooters we kept seeing in the streets was not just an impression. There were literally millions of them.
And all of it moves at the same time.
Cars, scooters, buses, trucks, bicycles, horse-drawn carriages, and pedestrians all fight for the same space. Traffic often looks as though the city has simply outgrown its own infrastructure. Jakarta does not feel like a city that was built and then filled with people; it feels more like an organism that kept expanding for as long as there was even one spare square metre left.
Maybe that is why the first impression is so powerful.
Everything is big.
The number of people.
The number of buildings.
The number of vehicles.
The noise.
The traffic.
The poverty.
And the luxury.
Only after we started exploring it properly did I realise that sheer size was not even the most interesting thing about Jakarta.
The most interesting thing was that every possible version of that enormous city existed right next to the others.
JAKARTA IS EVERYTHING AND JAKARTA IS NOTHING
In Jakarta we had guests again. Lorenc came from Bandung, and Marko from Hong Kong joined us as well, so the boat was full of people again. With them we explored the city, museums, squares, old neighbourhoods, shopping centres, and whatever else happened to appear along the way.
And during those days my picture of Jakarta slowly began to take shape.
Jakarta was everything and Jakarta was nothing.
In one part of the city, you find some of the most luxurious shopping malls imaginable. Louis Vuitton, luxury watches, restaurants, marble floors, glass, flawless air conditioning. Outside, a Lamborghini or Aston Martin showroom, with cars worth more than many of the people around them would earn in several lifetimes.
Then you drive a few minutes farther.
A house made of wood and sheet metal.
An open canal.
A man sleeping on cardboard.
Someone walking around wearing practically nothing but shorts or underwear.
Someone else carrying almost everything they own with them.
The strangest thing was that these two worlds were not separated by some obvious border. There was no moment when you could say, “Now we are leaving the rich part and entering the poor part.”
One simply flowed into the other.
Skyscraper.
Crumbling house.
Ferrari.
Bicycle.
Luxury hotel.
A man sleeping beside the road.
And all of it belongs to the same city, sometimes almost to the same street.
A CITY WHERE A BICYCLE BECOMES A BUSINESS
The poverty was impossible to ignore, but at the same time it was fascinating to see how people tried to build a business out of whatever they had.
Someone with nothing would sit by the road and try to earn a few coins any way they could. Someone who had a bicycle already had serious capital.
One bicycle became a coffee stall.
Another carried a tiny mobile shop.
Someone had even managed to mount a sewing machine on a bicycle and travelled from place to place offering clothing repairs on the spot.
No workshop.
No rent.
No address.
The shop was wherever the bicycle happened to be.
Horse-drawn carriages could still be seen on the streets, while scooters, cars, and luxury SUVs passed beside them. In one of the photographs I took, it is almost impossible to decide what the main subject is: the horse, the motorcycles, the old colonial building, or the people trying to move through all of it.
That is Jakarta in a single image.
SOME RULES ARE DIFFERENT HERE
Even completely ordinary things were interesting to us because they were so different from what we were used to.
People sat on the floor almost everywhere. In halls, on tiles, beside walls, on steps. Someone would sit down, take out some food, and eat. If they were tired, they would lie down.
Even in museums we saw people simply sitting on the clean tiled floor to rest.
At first this looked strange to us because we came from places with all sorts of unwritten rules about where you are supposed to sit, where you are supposed to eat, and how you are supposed to behave in public spaces. Here, those rules were clearly different.
At the same time, Jakarta also had a completely different kind of boundary.
Outside luxury hotels, office complexes, and expensive shopping centres, security guards were everywhere. We did not know the exact formal rules, but it was obvious that the doormen watched very carefully who was coming in.
On the street, you could sit almost anywhere.
At the entrance to another world, someone else decided whether you belonged there.
Another contradiction.
Another Jakarta.
TRAFFIC AS A SEPARATE DISCIPLINE
Traffic, of course, deserved a chapter of its own.
Once we were travelling by Grab toward the city and got stuck at a large intersection. Cars everywhere, motorcycles squeezing between them, everyone honking, everyone trying to move first, and nobody actually going anywhere.
After a while, our driver opened the window and threw a handful of small coins outside.
At first I had no idea what he was doing.
The coins were worth almost nothing, but a man from the street immediately picked them up, stepped into the middle of the intersection, and started directing traffic. He stopped one side with his hand, blocked the other with his body, and opened a path for us.
The driver simply accelerated.
We slipped through.
Done.
No police.
No forms.
No philosophy.
A handful of nearly worthless coins and a privately organised traffic-control system.
That was Jakarta.
Another time we were in a taxi when the driver pulled out a bottle and calmly relieved himself into it while driving.
He did not even stop.
Apparently, in a city like this you do not give up a good position in traffic just because nature calls.
On the way back from the embassy, another driver had a simpler method. He stopped beside one of the canals, got out of the car, did what he had to do, got back behind the wheel, and continued driving.
No drama.
Strange to us.
Tuesday to him.
MONAS – THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY
One of the places we visited was Monas, short for Monumen Nasional, the enormous National Monument that dominates central Jakarta.
It was built as a symbol of Indonesia’s struggle for independence after centuries of colonial rule. The tall white obelisk stands in the middle of Merdeka Square, and at the top is a large gilded sculpture of a flame — the Flame of Independence.
After Batavia, the VOC, and the old Dutch administrative buildings, Monas carries a completely different message. There you are looking at a city built so that someone else could control the country. Here stands a giant monument saying that that era is over.
For me, that contrast was much more interesting than the monument itself. In the same city, you have both the headquarters of colonial power and a symbol of liberation from it.
Jakarta moves you through three centuries of history in only a few kilometres.
And between them, more scooters.
INDONESIA IS NOT ONE THING
The more museums we visited, the clearer it became how difficult it is to explain what Indonesia actually is.
On a map it looks like a chain of islands scattered between Asia and Australia, but behind that are hundreds of completely different worlds. Thousands of islands, hundreds of ethnic groups, hundreds of languages, and very different religious, architectural, and cultural traditions.
Java is not Bali.
Bali is not Sumatra.
Sumatra is not Papua.
And yet all of it is Indonesia.
One of the best places to understand that was Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, a large cultural park created with the idea of presenting the entire country in one place.
You walk past traditional houses from different regions and some of them look as though they have absolutely nothing to do with one another. One has enormous curved roofs, another stands on stilts, another looks like something we might have seen on a completely different side of the Pacific.
And all of them are Indonesian.
That is where you begin to understand why creating a shared identity for this country was such a complicated project.
I had once heard a story that the common Indonesian language had been chosen by taking the language of one of the smallest ethnic groups so that none of the major groups would have an advantage.
It was a great story.
It just was not quite true.
Modern Bahasa Indonesia is based on Malay, which had already served for centuries as a trade and contact language throughout the archipelago. That gave it a practical advantage, but it was also a politically clever choice because Javanese belonged to by far the largest ethnic group. If Javanese had been declared the common language, everyone else could reasonably have asked whose country this was supposed to be.
Instead, everyone had to learn something that was meant to belong to everyone.
And somehow it worked.
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM – LONG BEFORE BATAVIA
In the National Museum of Indonesia, history suddenly goes much farther back.
The subject is no longer the Dutch or the modern state, but the entire history of the archipelago: ancient kingdoms, Hinduism, Buddhism, trade, inscriptions carved into stone, weapons, traditional clothing, objects from different islands, and finds from a time when Batavia did not exist even as an idea.
One exhibition caught my attention in particular — Homo floresiensis.
The remains of this unusual human species were found in the Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores. Because of their very small stature, roughly around one metre tall, they quickly became known as “hobbits.” The discovery in the early twenty-first century caused a huge stir among anthropologists because it showed that a very unusual branch of human evolution had existed on one isolated Indonesian island.
We looked at reconstructions, skulls, and the display about Liang Bua, and the whole story was remarkable precisely because it showed how little we still know about the people who once lived across these islands.
Some of the museum panels at the time still showed older estimates for the age of the finds, which later research continued to revise. I actually liked that part.
A museum reminds you that history is not always a finished book.
Sometimes you find a new bone and have to rewrite the whole story.
RAMA, SITA, AND THE PUPPETS
In the old part of the city we also visited Museum Wayang, dedicated to traditional Indonesian puppetry.
At first glance, wayang can look like a simple puppet show, but in this part of the world it has played a much deeper role for centuries. Through these performances, people passed on myths, moral lessons, history, and religious stories. The best-known form uses the flat leather puppets of wayang kulit, whose shadows are projected onto a screen while traditional music plays behind them.
And among those stories we once again came across Rama and Sita.
The Ramayana had already been following us through this part of Asia. The story originated in India but travelled east for centuries together with religion, trade, and people. Every culture changed it slightly, added something of its own, and turned it into a local version of the same story.
In Bali, Kecak and temples.
Here, wayang puppets.
Same story.
Different costume.
Although that day in the puppet museum, Marko and I apparently became more interesting than some of the exhibits.
People started coming up to us.
“Photo?”
Of course.
One.
Then another.
Then a family.
Then someone else.
We had absolutely no idea why they wanted pictures with us, but we politely agreed every time. By the end, it looked as though we had somehow arrived at our own meet-and-greet without anyone informing us.
Maybe there simply were not many white tourists around at that moment.
Whatever the reason, if we had already come to a puppet museum, it seemed fair that we should spend a little time as exhibits too.
THE FISHING DISEASE CONTINUES
As if the golden reel from Bali and the trolling rod capable of pulling up a small submarine were not enough, in Jakarta we somehow found the Indonesia Fishing Tackle Exhibition 2018.
Of course we did.
If there was a hall somewhere in a city of millions filled with rods, reels, lures, and equipment for enormous fish, apparently we were guaranteed to find it.
After months of fishing from the boat, fishing had already stopped being just something we did to have fresh fish. We had started learning the equipment, comparing reels, rods, lure types, and discussing things we had known absolutely nothing about only a few months earlier.
At the exhibition there was more of it than we could possibly need.
By then it was obvious that we had developed a new problem.
Not a shortage of equipment.
The desire to buy more.
THAILAND AND THE VISA I DID NOT GET
Eventually it was time to start thinking about the next leg of the journey.
Our next major destination was supposed to be Thailand. From the information I was able to find at the time, I needed a visa for my passport, so I decided to try to get one from the embassy in Jakarta.
It quickly became obvious that it was not going to be simple.
The procedure and the time required did not fit particularly well with the way we were travelling. A boat does not necessarily sit in one place for months just because someone needs another stamp.
In the end, I reached a very simple conclusion:
Fine. What am I supposed to do? I’ll go without a visa.
Whether that was the smartest strategy was another question.
But it was a strategy.
Malaysia was also becoming part of the equation, because I had a visa complication there as well. At that point we were more interested in finding a way forward than in solving every border in the most elegant possible order.
EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE
In the end, what stayed with me most about Jakarta was not any single landmark, but the contradictions.
Batavia and the VOC.
Monas and independence.
A prehistoric human from Flores.
The Ramayana.
Aston Martin.
A horse-drawn carriage.
A skyscraper.
A man selling coffee from a bicycle.
A museum.
A slum.
A luxury shopping centre.
A canal.
A man sleeping on the pavement.
None of those things could explain the city on its own.
Only when you put them all together do you get something close to a picture.
Jakarta was everything and Jakarta was nothing.
A city where it sometimes felt as if anyone could do whatever they wanted, and a few streets later a doorman’s glance reminded you that there were still places not everyone was welcome to enter.
A city where immense wealth and extreme poverty did not even seem to make much effort to hide from each other.
A city where you could move through several centuries of history during a single taxi ride.
We said goodbye first to Marko, and a little later to Lorenc as well. The boat became quiet again, and we slowly began preparing to continue toward Thailand.
After Jakarta, it was difficult to imagine what else in Asia could seriously surprise us.
Which, of course, was probably the best possible way to be completely unprepared for whatever came next.