ANZAC Day

This morning we went to the ANZAC dawn service in Jakarta at the Commonwealth War Graves area in the cemetery just up the road from us in the middle of Jakarta.

The ceremony was well done, if slightly surreal with the sounds of the ceremony mixed with the call to prayer and the local roosters. The cemetery is in a well kept area with graves including those Australians from the various WW2 battles around Java. Alison's cousin John came and lent Alison her grandfathers WW1 medals to wear which touched her.

After the ceremony we wandered through the cemetery.

I randomly took this then looked up the name when I came home. Olga was a British nurse who was on the Vyner Brooke when it sank, she survived that though heavily pregnant giving birth after 40 hours on a raft and narrowly missing the massacre of nurses including 21 Australians at Bangka Island not far from Belitung where we holidayed earlier this year, but was captured and died of malnutrition in a POW camp.

There were quite a few graves that looked like this.

There is also an area for the Dutch war graves and a complex that includes a Church, Mosque and Hindu temple all together that I have to come back and explore. We went from there to the gunfire breakfast put on by the Kiwis in the extravagant Kipinski Ballroom in Hotel Indonesia and to the Nirvana Bar after that for a few drinks. I think this bar is where much of the "Year of Living Dangerously" was set.