Friday, March 14, 2008

Muara Angke

As part of the research we were doing a couple of weeks ago, we went up to a neighborhood in North Jakarta called Muara Angke. It's the fishing part of town, right next to the water, and the first thing we saw -- and smelled -- when we stepped out of the taxi were long rows of fish drying in the sun.


Notice the trashunder the tables. With its location on Jakarta Bay, Muara Angke is the unlucky recipient of tons of garbage from the rivers that flow through the city. A portion of the town is actually built out over the bay on a crazy system of stilts and improvised walkways, but there's so much garbage everywhere I often couldn't tell where the land stopped and the water began.


Here we're definitely over water. These bamboo walkways are quite strong, but get slippery when they're wet. The houses are improvised out of scrap materials.

Even the fishing boats were mired in garbage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somewhere around the house I have some photos of big fish heads hanging on racks to dry in Iceland. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, we could smell them from miles away. That is definitely an aroma that crosses cultural boundaries!

Local ex-pat lore held that the fish were ground up for chicken feed, and that Icelandic chickens tasted like fish! But I did not try any while I was there...

Trish said...

Hmm, I don't remember eating chicken on either of my trips to Iceland ... I was too busy eating fish! But I'll have to try it someday when I'm rich and go on one of those expensive vacations where you go out on a horse and "help" the ranchers round up the sheep for the winter.

Chicken here tastes slightly sulphury. I'm not sure why. And it tastes more "chickeny" than American chickens.

Do you ever think about going back to Iceland? I really liked it. I have to stop going there in the winter, though!