Metro Mad: Say It with Flowers

Sun, 10/12/2008 9:48 AM  |  Mosaic

Thank the Lord that another holiday season has finally ended in a colorful blaze of dangerously substandard fireworks, chili-induced heartburn and 17 km long road tailbacks. If you returned to your home village, I hope you had a lovely time and managed to discourage your relatives from returning to the Big Durian with you by informing them that Jakarta's streets are not in fact paved with gold, but something altogether browner and sludgier.

If you attempted to drive out of town for reasons other than filial duty then what the hell were you thinking? Actually, what the hell was I thinking when I agreed to accompany a friend on a drive up to Puncak on the Wednesday of Idul Fitri itself? The journey into the hills was not too bad, with the drizzle adding to the delicious coolness and relief of reaching an altitude superior to the capital's warm fart ambience.

We were going to stay in one of Puncak's huge holiday villa complexes for a couple of days. Our accommodation was called Kota Bunga (Flower City). After a nightcap or three and a hearty sleep I awoke and went for a stroll to familiarize myself with the Kota Bunga experience firsthand in all of its prefabricated, garish hideousness.

The complex covers a huge area and is arranged into neat suburban cul-de-sacs of houses that are seemingly exactly the same as the full-time Jakarta pied-a-terres of the families who come to stay here. The only discernible difference would possibly be the vibrant hues of the houses' exteriors and the postmodern mishmash of cutesy architectural designs that resemble a Walt Disney acid trip.

The Flower City seemed to be mainly populated by aspirational Chinese-Indonesian families of a familiar type (just to delve into the unconscionable world of racial stereotypes for a moment). Big Mercedes, Dad in a bright nylon T-shirt, Mum's hair extravagantly coiffured into a vertiginous gravity defying quiff and two Nintendo brained children having ice cream and noodles shoveled down their wide bore gullets by a Javanese girl in a nurses uniform.

Stereotypes don't always hold true though. I was actually visiting the Flower City with my Chinese-Indonesian friend and his girlfriend. Into his 40s and not yet married, he does not really fit into the charming family unit model described above. He does, however, strive to avoid encountering these bi-ethnic nuclear families due to endless inquiries about his marriage status. The subject is raised so often it begins to resemble a skipping CD.

Strolling around Kota Bunga's yellow brick road boulevards it became evident that any expression of West Javanese culture had been tastefully airbrushed from this theme park in the quest for a constant theme. Admittedly there was an area in the complex called Kampung Budaya (Cultural Village), but its cultural reach did not seem to extend beyond an overpriced KFC and a swimming pool full of urinating kids.

Further up the hill we came across the focal point of Flower City, a lake full of banana boats and a mini Mississippi steamer. Around the edge, a postmodern apocalypse of ersatz Greek friezes, old English lamp standards and mock European architecture clashed in tasteless hyperreality, stripped of their symbolic meanings and transplanted into this toy town fantasy. Pride of place though went to the scale mock up of Mount Rushmore that perplexingly loomed 30 meters high over the lake. The chiseled faces of the four stern-looking U.S. presidents surveyed the scene before them as if about to pass judgment.

Later that evening we drove to another Puncak mega villa complex, this one titled Green Apple, where loud music blared over fake bright yellow castle turrets and battlements while hordes of Green Apple residents shopped for cheap T-shirts and high-cholesterol snacks.

A more intense vision of hell I had never seen... until the next day when the time arrived to drive back to town. Poor timing resulted in an Armageddon-style traffic jam as we descended the hills. This must be what really happens in hell. You sit in a four-hour traffic jam, shouting imprecations at the dashboard, before reaching your fiery destination and burning for a few hours. You then stand up, dust yourself off, receive a new set of car keys from the Devil himself and start the whole process again.

I need a holiday.

--Simon Pitchforth

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