Back in December while I was in Singapore we had a meeting to discuss the project assignments for me and my colleagues that were headed to Indonesia. Indonesia is an expansive country, so it was no surprise that we would be spread out around the archipelago. I was slated to go to Sumatra, Harshit would be near Jakarta, Jay would be traveling all over, and Rocio was going to Bandung. I had never heard of Bandung before that meeting, but I was told it is a large city in West Java, not too far from Jakarta.
Most people were saying good things about Bandung to Rocio. It is the old Dutch summer capital. It’s higher up in the mountains so it is cooler than Jakarta, and less congested, although I later found out that one’s perception of congestion is only relative.
One of my closest co-workers in Medan lived in Bandung for half of his life and he loves it there. We have a unit of our coffee business in Bandung, and I was given the opportunity to work with this unit last week. Despite the nice things I had heard about Bandung I found even more nice things to like about the city and the surrounding region.
Bandung lies inside a volcanic crater. The city is surrounded by hills, mountains, and volcanoes, both active and dormant (although I never believe that a volcano is truly dormant). It is cooler than other parts of Indonesia, but I still found it warm. The locals were bundled up in jackets and wool caps though. Weather, like traffic, is a relative factor. My first impression of the city was the airport. It’s a relatively small airport. There are no jetways. We walked off the plane, on to the tarmac, and directly into the terminal. I had no bag to collect so I went for the exit. There was no labyrinth of escalators and hallways to navigate. The airport did not exit out to vast parking lots or suburban wasteland. Right there in front of me was the city. People on motorcycle were zipping on by and there was a Starbucks and a restaurant right across the street.
The unit head for Olam spotted me from my Olam hat and greeted me. He could tell I was startled that I was basically curb side in the middle of the city. He told me that the airport is right in the middle of the city, and that I was lucky to be on time because flights are often delayed due to fog and other adverse weather conditions.
Bandung is a very vibrant city. It’s a university center for Java. There are tons of students and other young people stuffed shoulder to shoulder in cafes around laptops and out on the streets taking artsy photos. The city center retains the old Dutch deco buildings. They are all white with red tile roofs. Some of them are very handsome and now converted into banks, museums, restaurants, and hotels.
If Bandung is a city where people live, Medan is merely a city where people exist. While Medan is large, each street seems like a facsimile of the last. Walk out to the street and you can find eateries selling the same noodles, rice, or soup. Bandung is far more varied, with Indonesian culinary classics being served alongside Sundanese regional cuisine. I had squid two different ways (once in a fiery red sauce and once in black squid ink), and I also tried a hot drink of coconut, ginger, and palm sugar. Bandung also has a large turf lawn in front of the central mosque. When I walked by it was filled with families lounging and playing.
Monument to the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955
Bandung is the center of the Sunda ethnic group in Indonesia. They live primarily in western Java. The narrow waters between Sumatra and Java are known as the Sunda Strait. It is in these waters that Krakatoa lies. An underwater landslide on an emergent Krakatoa caused a deadly tsunami that struck extreme western Java in December. The Sundanese have their own musical, culinary, and narrative traditions, as well as a distinct language (as do most ethnic groups in Indonesia). Thank you in Sundanese is “hatur nahun” and you’re welcome is “sami sami” (it is “sama sama” in Bahasa Indonesian, the national language).
Bandung also has a fashion and design culture. The hotel I stayed in, a self-named “art-hotel,” has a small design shop in the lobby. They had beautiful textiles and batiks, which are traditional Indonesian button-down shirts. They must have been hand painted, because some of them were more than $400! There are other boutiques in the city, and I think that Indonesian’s home-grown outdoors equipment and apparel company, Eiger, has its headquarters in Bandung.
Bandung has embraced its reputation for coffee production (the occasion for my visit). There are trendy cafés everywhere. It’s overkill in my opinion, but Bandung has been attracting Jakartans by the car full and Singaporeans and Malaysians by the plane full to take latte art selfies and to go shopping in the city.
Beyond the urban culture, Bandung has abundant natural attractions to its north and south. I was in the verdant hills of the south to visit our coffee operations. They also grow bamboo for construction and other uses, plus lots of vegetables and even strawberries. In the north there are tea plantations, volcanic craters, sulfuric lakes, and beautiful vistas of the landscape, covered in pine tree forests. I went to a small park on the north side of the city which sits alongside a gorge. Some of the cliff sides have been excavated by the Dutch and then by the Japanese (using forced Indonesian labor) during their occupation of Indonesia during WWII. The caves have been used for armament storage, as a jail, and may have been the site of atrocities against Indonesians during WWII. There are small monkey running around all over the park. They seem fairly docile and most interested in picking up food scraps left over by human park visitors.
I’m now on a flight back to Medan. My main business in Bandung was to learn as much as I could about our coffee operations in the region. Having accomplished that, I now must adapt what I’ve learned into a plan to bring our digital inventory tracking system to Bandung. I hope that I can go back to Bandung for the implementation of the new system and see and experience more of the city and the region that I was not able to on this past visit.