Food in Melati Mas, Tangerang

You can really enjoy food in Indonesia for barely 1,- €. There is a nice restaurant in Melati Mas called Jes Jos. My favourite dish for Rp 15,000 or a bit more than 1 € is a big serve of nasi goreng pete(fried rice with meat and "stinking" peas pete). It is a real clean restaurant and they deliver everything to your place for free.

Would you like to have a good breakfast?
Before I leave the house about 6.00 am for the internet cafe to do my both offline and online work(offline is cheaper BTW), I have breakfast first. Ah Lim, located at the corner of Jalan Raya Melati Mas(main road of Melati Mas) sells the famous steam mee for Rp 9.000. The ketoprak vendors or Indonesian salat with rice noodles and peanut sauce start to sell around 9 am. You can get a nasi uduk(rice steamed in coconut milk) for Rp 3000 without meat but you need to come before 8 am.

The hygiene especially in the charts of the street vendors leaves much to be desired. One morning I saw the village people doing their morning business in the river where they got the water for coffee about one hour later. I have watched some people using water out of the gutter for cooking or to prepare salad, the cleanest one was actually somebody who used water to wash the cars. My tip would be to choose the small street restaurants or stalls instead of the vendors. But the Tahu Sumedang or freshly fried tofu cubes cost so little and you can get it piping hot from the vendor.

Even a restaurant with a karaoke is not particularly expensive. The Furami or Nyonya Suharti restaurant is reasonably cheap and you can sit in a clean and cosy environment. For fried carp with sauce you pay around Rp 30000 or € 2,- for a huge serve with a delicious sauce. Apart from this furami serves sumptuous dinners and karaoke singing if you wish. At night you will see a BBQ seafood stall in front of the BSD shopping plaza.

What can we do to avoid a serious bug like typhoid, salmonella, clostridium difficile and all those lovely pets? Of course we are all better off with immunisation and this can be very cheap in Asia too. A strong immune system is paramount and about 70% of it is located in the digestive system. We need enough sleep which is sometimes not easy, especially when you are couchsurfing. Aa positive attitude and healthy food supports our immune system. About 10 days prior to travelling and during the whole travel period I start to take prebiotics from the pharmacy on a regular basis. Perenterol has significant studies and it worked well for me. This increases the amount of natural intestinal flora which are well-known to deflect germs.

Use your eyes to judge the food - you wouldn't regret it!!!!

Public transportation in Melati Mas, Tangerang, Indonesia

We arrived at Sukarno Hatta Airport in Jakarta around 10 pm. The first thing we needed to do was to look for a taxi. There was a taxi counter where I met a Dutch backpacker couple. A taxi to Jakarta costed Rp 200.000,-- or € 13,-. Not too much for European standards.It was late and not too many taxis around and the few which were there were firmly in the hand of touts.


In order to catch a proper taxi we needed to go on the street and wave a taxi. The touts screamed very agressively at us because they felt their business slipping through their hands. They offered the taxi to a family and they were gentleman enough to leave us the taxi.

Different from the well-known registered taxi companies like Silver Bird and Bluebird, these taxidrivers are not always trustworthy. And they deliberately drive slowly to increase the price, so the best way would be to negotiate the price in advance. We agreed on Rp 70.000, less than half the price of the agency. As these taxis didn't have a GPS we needed to guide him through to Melati Mas near BSD city in the Tanggerang area.

I lived in a fairly new and quite safe area in Melati Mas. You need to pass a guarded barrier to enter the area. There were just few shops around and quite a few street vendors selling vegetables and meat. Since our house was in a very new street, the vendors didn't show too much interest to come directly to our house. The supermarket "Giant" and the other shops and restaurants were located about 1/2 hour walk from our house. Somewhat tiresome from somebody who is vision impaired with arthritis.

The main road to the shopping complex was busy and the pavement started just close to the supermarket. At the beginning of the street cars were just parked recklessly on the pedestrian path. Pedestrians didn't receive much respect from cars and motorcycles, so if you walk around these cars you very well end up as minced meat.

Taxis refused to ride such a short distance and there were no bajais, a kind of motorised rickshaw in Jakarta. The only means of transportations were the ojeks or motorcycle taxis. They did not wear helmets and drivers were usually very uneducated and agressive. Where ever I walked, they offered their ojek in a pushy manner and if you ignore them they started yelling at you.

I spoke to many well-to-do Indonesians who just hopped on and off their Mercedes. They had no understanding for the pedestrians and could not imagine the hardships they had to endure to cross the street.

Every morning I used to walk to the internet cafe or warnet because I needed to do my online and offline work. This internet cafe was open for 24 hours, quite convenient where the client had their own cabin with a fast operating system. The food was excellent and incredibly cheap, so normally I could survive on roughly 1 € per day