Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

I hired a taxi from the taxi counter, rather than haggle with one on the street. The counter agent escorted me past a row of ATMs, so I stopped and tried again, hoping for better luck than I had in Bali. It turned out to be worse. The machine ate my card. The counter agent was helpful, and tried smacking the machine and calling the bank, but to no avail. So I'm down one ATM card.

The ride into the city was a chance for a classic Jakarta experience: traffic. Everyone has warned me that traffic here is terrible, but since I was in a taxi van that I wasn't driving, I didn't mind so much. There's less honking than in Vietnam, and the traffic we were in was moving, however slowly. It was fun to watch the different kinds of traffic weaving in and out. I took a few pictures of dramatically lit traffic scenes, but I think the exposures won't work out. I'm too tired to mess with the camera settings right now.

The hotel seems nice enough. They had my reservation, and the Wifi works, so I was able to make some skype calls to my ATM card company.