One day in Jayapura

So...it’s Jayapura. It is capital of Papua. If you asking me what you can do in Jayapura for one day. Here is my answer. You can cross the border to Papua New Guinea from Jayapura. So..i made this happen to me, crossing Indonesia-PNG border. Although that  wouldn’t get my passport be stamped, but i think it’s cool too. For crossing the border from Jayapura, you should go all the way eastward to Skouw. This trip took about 2 hours from Sentani. We passed  through the hilly road with so many crooks, there was sea side view sometimes. I also crossed the flat area with rice field, just like in Jawa. Seems that Javanese people live there.

Before entering the border area, we must report to military post first. Actually both PNG and Indonesian are freely crossing this border, but only for one day trip. Usually people from both side will go to other side market for buying their daily needs. Maybe because we look like tourist group, so we have to report and left one’s id before we entered the border. We have to report again at Indonesian Custom office, but it looked like only for saying hi. Then we parked the car in Indonesia side, i can saw the light house from here. Apparently this border is located near the cliff of sea side. But i couldn’t see the sea directly, there are a lot of trees along the edge.

So, there are two gates at the border, the Indonesia gate and PNG gate. Between those gates is the neutral zone. Passing the PNG custom, we can not bring the SLR camera to PNG. Only pocket digicam or hand phone are allowed. I don’t know why, maybe they are afraid that we will do the espionage activity, haha...lol. and after that...here I’m Papua New Guinea! Generally the situation is similar with Skouw, but the market here is smaller than Skouw. They sell canned food, PNG souvenir such as hat, small flag, and t-shirts. There is also some food stalls, I tasted one of the food. The seller is a lady with her two sons. She sells fried lamb and fried banana. I tasted both the lamb and banana. Actually I did it, not because it looked delicious, more because I was curious. The taste is not that good for me, especially the lamb, I think it was cooked less well. You still can taste a little bit of the unwelldone meat of lamb. She gave me the salt to be added. Yeah..it tasted better than before, you just have to make sure that the salty covered the unwelldone meat taste. I don’t know how to describe the banana. It is only the simple fried pealed banana. I think I could feel a bit of the unwelldone meat of lamb in the fried banana. This lady btw and I think also the other sellers in that PNG side market, they know several Indonesian words. Usually the words that can be use for transaction, such as numbers, greet, say thanks, delicious, 5W1H words. And the English skill is quite good, at least for the transaction activity.

Btw the name of this PNG area is Wutung village.

One funny think i found here was, i saw the poster of Lukas Enembe, an Indonesian politician from one of Indonesian party from Papua electoral area. Hm... is that allowed?

PNG people in Skouw market.

After more photographed session, we went back to our car in Indonesia, and continued to twent back to market in Skouw. The market in Skouw is bigger and there are more people shopping there. I think more PNG people go to this market and shop here than the other one. But there is one minus thing that I dont like in Skouw, this market is dirtier than the one in Wutung. The variety of the selling goods is more here, they sell basic needs such as clothes, movie dvd’s (the piracy version), house hold goods, vegetables, and of course the most favourite thing in Papua that is pinang. Pinang is the most favorite fruit in Papua, I think. You chew this pinang with kapur, then you seep it until it becomes red, and maybe until the taste is gone after that you have to throw the pinang spit from your mouth, but dont forget to also spit the pinang because you are not suppose to swallow it. The pinang spit have red color, so no wonder there are lot of red stain everywhere in most public area in Papua. But there are some places that put on a board written the prohibition of the pinang spit.

PNG people parks his motor bike in Skouw market.

A Papuan kid smile to my camera :)

Then we drove back to Jayapura, through the different route this time. I didn’t really notice how is the route, because I got a pretty bad stomachache because of my period. So I fell asleep. But one thing I notice was I think we drove near the beach. And then we stopped at Base G beach in Jayapura (forget the name), quite nice beach, I tend to say that it is not a very clean beach, but ya...not a dirty one too, quite well, not dissapoint me as a beach. We paid I think 10 thousand per car for entering the beach. There are benches in the beach, that you can sit on, but you have to pay for that. It is a creamy white sand beach, it’s too bad that we can not see the sunset from here. The sun set almost behind the beach. And the hill blocked our sunset.

I walked around the beach side, watching some kids play around in the water. They are really sweet, I took pictures of them playing around the beach, capture their smiley faces, what a sweet expression, I like them. Most of them are really excited to be photographed, and they pose for me.

Then we left the beach, and then this shocking thing happen. The man that live near the beach, asked for the parking fee of our cars. And you know what, they asked 100 thousands rupiah for 2 cars for I think no more than 2 hours. What a very expensive parking fee in Indonesia.

Where to eat : We had dinner in Blue Cafe. It is a quite nice concept of restaurant, located in the sea side of a gulf. People here call this area as Ruko, near Swiss Bell Hotel. You can see city light of Jayapura from here, even they have live music here. They sell vary of grilled fish, but also another sea food such as crab and their friends :p they offer 4 kinds of sauce. First is the usual Indonesian red chili sauce, then dabudabu, yellow sauce (made from ginger), and ketchup chili sauce. The food here definitely way much better than the one we have at lunch. I like the dinner! Btw I also order the stir-fry of kangkung and papaya flower, very Manado food. For me this is the most perfect dinner so far.

Where to stay: Rasen Hotel. Quite nice hotel, clean, they have ac, tv, hot water. I stay at a twin bed room at Rp 290000 per night for my room. And only 5 minutes drive from Sentani airport.

Travel date: August 2011