Walking

I have been doing a fair bit of walking around the area to familiarise myself. We live in an area with boom gates in a suburb in South Jakarta. I have never seen the gates closed or anyone questioned coming in or out but there are always security guards in the little booth near them. We are just down the road from this park.

Its  nice, but pretty much a jungle so you can't actually walk on the green stuff. To get in and out of out of the area you mostly have to cross a small bridge over what we have affectionately called 'stinky creek'.

Looks nicer than it is. It smells 'orrible' and is pretty much a drain/sewer. All the canals/rivers in  Jakarta seem similar. The rivers have a hard time getting to the sea because Jakarta is subsiding. 

This is the bridge on a Sunday when there is no traffic. During the week its a bottleneck as lots of people use this as a rat-run through the suburb to avoid the main roads. This is a main road that runs on one side of our suburb.

Here I am up on a pedestrian overpass. The footpaths are all fairly sketchy and sometimes not there. You often just walk on the road and trust people not to kill you. They all drive well and fairly slowly so its not as bad as it sounds. The footpaths also quite often have holes in them so you have to watch where you go.

Not far from us ( easy 20 minute walk ) is Mega Kuningan which is an area with large buildings, and swish hotels ( like the Ritz Carlton and Marriot which were bombed in 2009 ). The footpaths there are better, but this just means enterprising motor bike drivers are likely to be driving on them.