Dharma Bahti temple – Trums Travels

We spend about 31 days in Indonesia. We only visited 3 islands on this trip; Java, Bali and Lombok and they are all next to each other. Indonesia is comprised of over 17,000 islands and the archipelago stretches almost 5200 km along the equator from Banda Aceh, to the tip of Sumatra in the west. It is home to over 275 million people and is the fourth most populous nation globally. The majority of the population is Muslim while on the island of Bali, Hindu is the dominant religion. Some areas, Batak highlands, Nias island, Papua (islands) are Catholics or Protestants.

We started in the city of Jakarta and we were there for a couple of days on our own. Greater Jakarta has a population of 41.9 million people and is recognized as the world’s most populous city. It’s hard to believe when my entire country of Canada has only 41 million and that one city just about that many! Just because I was curious, I googled biggest country in the world by landmass with respective (approximate) population numbers:

Russia: 17.1 million km² 143.4 million people
Canada: 10.0 million km² 41 million people
United States: 9.5 million km² 349.3 million people
China: 9.6 million km² 1 1/2 billion people (this is hard for me to fathom)
Brazil: 8.5 million km² 213 million people

But back to our trip ……………… I liked the city, it was easy to get around. Clint and I do a lot of walking and if it gets to be too much, we get a cab. We took a cab one day, it was a 30 minute drive and cost about $7 Canadian, not bad eh?

We went to a market the first day we were there, I love markets. We also walked to the Dharma Bahti temple, the National Monument and we found a great beer garden called Melly’s. The first time we went to the beer garden, it wasn’t open but the owner served us anyways. We had some pleasant conversations with him. It was about a 1/2 hour walk from our hotel but it was a great spot and we went there a few times. (our hotel was Muslim so no bar there !)

The market was quite something, very narrow streets. People walking and motorbikes going both directions, you had to have your head on a swivel !

They were selling these birds in the market and also at the temple. The man selling them at the temple told me I could buy one and then I could let it go free. Um no thanks……..if I did buy one, the bird is probably trained to go back to the man. Plus there was nowhere to wash my hands and I didn’t have hand sanitizer with me. And more importantly, these birds shouldn’t be caged up anyways but it’s their culture so…………

I have a lot of photos so this will be a two part Jakarta post… maybe three…

Here are some photos of our time in Jakarta