The Rainy Season in Jakarta

I traveled to Jakarta recently, one week after major flooding devastated many parts of the city, leaving at least four people dead and hundreds homeless.  It’s the rainy season here.

I learned lots about the city, the main one being that as demand for building land grows, the local authorities authorise the draining of land to create new space on which to build.  This is having a catastrophic effect.  The ground is sinking, so when heavy rain comes it floods the city.

Many families are so poor they live in shacks wherever they can find a space.  Many live in cemeteries –  in one room corrugated ‘buildings’.  The floods came and literally took everything they had.  Piles of debris had been bulldozed to the sides of the road awaiting removal.  Mattresses, chairs, pots, pans, clothes – all stacked high alongside busy main roads.

Mopeds/motorcycles are the main form of transport, competing for road space with cars and trucks.  There do not seem to be any written rules of the road.  There may be three lanes painted on the road surface but there are five lanes of traffic, and mopeds dash in and out of the lines.  How anyone isn’t hurt is beyond me.  I just had to close my eyes and let the taxi driver do what he was paid to do – drive!

So here is a selection of photos from my trip.  Please click on them to see a larger image.

They don’t look much, but notice how so many have satellite dishes on the roof!

Jakarta is building upwards at an astonishing rate. Down at ground level the run down shacks fight for space.

West Sumatran food – wonderful.

Rain clouds above and reflected in the skyscrapers. With this storm came high winds. Having been flooded out the week before, the locals were nervous.

The clouds are so dark and heavy it feels like twilight in the middle of the afternoon.

The call to prayer goes out from 4.30am each morning. Don’t count on getting much sleep in Indonesia!

They might look like rubbish dumps but they are in fact moped/motorcycle parks!

Related articles

• Floods paralyze Indonesian capital; at least 4 die (newsinfo.inquirer.net)
• Jakarta floods as monsoon soaks Indonesia (guardian.co.uk)

06 Feb This entry was published on February 6, 2013 at 8:55 pm. It’s filed under Photos and tagged Canon, Flood, Indonesia, Jakarta, Kate Hobbs, Monsoon, Photograph, Photography, PostADay2013, Poverty, Rain, Traffic, Water, Wet season. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.