Category: Travel Blog

Quite honestly speaking, Taman Safari is simply the destination to be if you are to visit Jakarta. Equipped with tons of carrots and bananas, we drove into a path that most animals roamed freely. Animals such as zebras and deer, they tended to stick their heads into the car as they munched onto the carrots we held. Those big wet snouts and teeth may have scared or disgusted the living helium out of Mark and Cynthia – who were the guardians of the passenger car windows. I have to keep screaming at them in a friendly way to keep the windows opened. It was a total pandemonium inside the car with everyone screaming for different reasons, but in a good and fun way.

One time, an elephant walked by and as it put its face really close to the car, it was like that one Jurassic scene. What I saw was one huge eye and the reptilian textured skin around the eye and nothing else. Very scary! Even I did scream a bit.

There were other tame animals strolling along the path as well. Like that huge hippo, I have no idea what it was eating. Hippos are like big bags of fat to me. Gruesome! No way on earth I am going to touch them.

The not so tame animals were breathtaking. It was the first time for all of us – Mark, Felicia, Cynthia, her mother, and I – to be in such proximity with the tigers, and lions, and leopards, and bears. Each zone is guarded by two huge iron gates in both entrance and exit. As you can imagine, having any of these animals leave their zones would definitely spell trouble to the rest of the animals outside the zones.

Just how close we were with these wild animals? Not more than 2 meters I reckon. We were warned to keep our windows closed at all time while inside the zones but being the Animal Planet journalists-want-to-be, Mark and I did wind down the windows when the lions seemed to be having a nap (and then one of them half opened its eyes and scared the living calcium out of us) and when a tiger took a walk away from us (and when it did came back towards us, we quickly closed the windows). Mark managed to take the video clips of two bears fighting, or rather playing, with one and other in a pool of muddy water as well as one tiger picked up a fight with another tiger that was taking a nap. The tigers were no further than 10 to 15 meters away from us and the roar of a tiger has definitely left a lasting impression to me. There was even a white tiger too! Majestic! One thing I can’t comprehend is why these wild animals love to rest on those manmade wooden platforms that were placed just beside the path? Is it more comfortable to sunbath on a raised platform rather than on the grassland under the shade? Or it is closer to human meat?

Some of you may have read my writing about a monkey (or rather an orangutan) that threw the banana back to me twice while I was trying to feed it across the canal. That was 10 years ago by the way. Well, I am not sure if it was the same orangutan that walked towards our car. If so, it seems to have grown much bigger. I wish I could have taken a picture of what happened next but the bus behind us sort of shoved us away. So, I shall try to describe in words. One orangutan walked slowly towards us and as it reached the canal, it slowly stood up in its two legs – with its chins high and stomach tucked in – it raised its right hand to the sky with its palm stretched flat. I picture the orangutan as the pillar of the ancient disc world. The scene was majestic. What was it doing? I have no clue (some guessed that it was asking for bananas). And it maintained that posture for a good few minutes in front of all the tourists.

If you do visit Taman Safari, which is a one to two hours drive from Jakarta, I would recommend buying some carrots and bananas before you enter. Of course, hire a driver will give you a more personal experience than taking a bus. Since feeding the orangutans is discouraged, I think the only animals that eat bananas are the small bears and elephants. Hence, do get more carrots instead. Blow about two third or even three quarter of what you have for the beginning route right before entering the “danger” zones. Obviously, those tigers or lions are more interested in you rather than your carrots and bananas. There aren’t that many animals to feed after those zones.

I wish I could write more on our wonderful trip to the beautiful city of Bandung – Cynthia’s birth-town – but I shall leave this to another blog or article. After I sort out the photos back in Singapore, I will share them with you all. Once again, stay tuned!

 After traveling gazillions of miles across the ocean just to see her, Cynthia did not even realize that I have a “new haircut”! Umph! I protested, and her immediately reply was: it is not a “new” haircut, just a haircut. She reminded me that I have the same hairdresser for the last 10 years and have only changed my hairstyle once. OK, Cynthia might have been preoccupied with the board presentation early next morning … but still …

By the time Cynthia handed me the one million rupiah as pocket money to spend during my stay in Indonesia, I have totally forgotten my new haircut.

After reading that the SeaWorld at Ancol is larger than Singapore’s Underwater World, I wanted to pay SeaWorld a visit. I LOVE seeing fishes, or anything that moves underwater. Whenever I pass by a fish tank – be it as the one that belongs to the restaurant or at the fish market – I would stop and admire those sea creatures. If I was able to swim in midair like what the fish does in water, I would not have the need to take the lift anymore. In fact, if we all had the memory duration of a goldfish (10 seconds I heard), we would not have remembered that the Arwana in front has already eaten our fathers, and our mothers, and our friends, and our neighbors.

World peace cannot be simpler than this.

I tried to take pictures of the sharks but they swam too fast. I tried to take micro shots of some really weird looking tiny sea creatures too. I love the SeaWorld. I don’t think it is that much bigger than the Singapore version. In fact, both look very similar though I think the aquarium in Singapore is more densely populated. I was lost inside the SeaWorld. It is so beautiful. And I think I have lost Felicia there too wondering why a grown up man is so fascinated with … fishes. Not just fishes, there is a Duyung too!

It is an understatement to say that, in return, Felicia has lost me inside two of the malls near Ancol – Mal Mangga Dua and Mangga Dua ITC. I actually had quite a tough time trying to recall how to pronounce “ITC” in Bahasa Indonesia so that the taxi driver would know – with clarity – where we wished to head to. Mal Mangga Dua is huge, mostly packed with IT goods (so many pirated software and videos!). The bridge that connects the two malls has two levels of shopping area. And ITC is just purely humungous. We could hardly see the other end of the mall. We could hardly breathe inside the mall. ITC mostly sells very affordable clothes and shoes that follow closely with fashion. If you were to ask me, I would say fashion is to the eyes of the beholder.

I have had language lessons in Jakarta before but that was long time ago. OK, I didn’t do too badly today, I think. We seemed to be able to understand the price of the goods most of the time, bargain for a better price, ask for different sizes and colors, and shuttle around town without getting lost. Of course I still got things mixed up. Like one time, I thought the dress only cost Rp 20,000 but in fact, the asking price as Rp 200,000. No wonder they kept saying that the price was negotiable and seemed curious why I was not shocked by their initial offer. I greeted people with “selamat siang” and then when I heard them saying “sore”, I suddenly remembered that “siang” is for early afternoon while “sore” is for late afternoon. I kept thinking that “kereta” means car but in fact, “kereta” is Malay and for Bahasa Indonesia, it should be “mobil”. No wonder the taxi driver was a bit lost when I tried to make small talks with him. Throughout the day I was trying to recall how to say “person” in Bahasa Indonesia. And in the late evening, the word “orang” sprang out of nowhere. I thought my pronunciation of the word toilet was near perfect (the fallacy of pride) and when I told Cynthia that people didn’t understand what I said, she immediately bursted out in laughter saying that it should be “kamar kecil” and not “kamakaci” as I have so perfectly pronounced.

The beauty of a foreign language.

Tomorrow, it will be Mark and Cynthia’s off day and we will be heading to the beautiful city called Bandung. Stay tuned.