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BANDUNG |
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Set high above sea level, and protected by a fortress of sullen
volcanoes 190km southeast of Jakarta, BANDUNG is the third largest city
in Indonesia and a centre of industry and traditional Sundanese arts -
with plenty of cultural performances for tourists - though it suffers
from traffic pollution and uninteresting modern developments. Sundanese
culture has remained intact here since the fifth century when the first
Hindu Sundanese settled in this part of West Java. Modern Bandung's main
tourist attraction is nearby Tangkbuhan Prahu volcano , and there's a
very pleasant two-hour forest walk down to the city too.
The Dutch spotted the potential of this lush cool plateau and its
fertile volcanic slopes in the mid-seventeenth century, and set about
cultivating coffee and rice here. But it wasn't until the early
nineteenth century that the planters decided to settle in the area, at
Bandung, rather than commute from Batavia. Several relics from the
city's colonial era remain, including some of the elegant shops along
Jalan Braga, and some fine buildings on Jalan Asia-Afrika
The City
Heading east down Jalan Asia-Afrika, along the northern edge of the alun-alun,
you come to the Gedung Merdeka building , which hosted the first Asia-Afrika
Conference in 1955 and is known as the Asia-Afrika or Liberty building.
Inside, a small museum commemorates the conference. Many of the
delegates stayed at the nearby Art Deco Savoy Homann hotel, which opened
in 1939 and is still one of Bandung's premier hotels. Slightly west of
here is the beginning of Jalan Braga , the chic shopping boulevard of
1920s Bandung. There's still one bakery here that's tried to hang on to
its history, and a few of the facades maintain their stylish designs.
The side streets that run off Jalan Braga were notorious for their
raucous bars and brothels - at night a lot of the seediness remains.
North of Jalan Braga, to the east of Kebun Raya park, off Jalan Sumatra,
is the bizarre Taman Lalu Lintas, the " Traffic Park ". Designed to
educate kids in the way of the highway, it has a system of miniature
cars, roads and street signs. A twenty-minute walk to the northeast, the
impressive Gedung Sate building at Jl Diponegoro 22, is known as the
Sate Building because the regular globules on its gold-leaf spire
resemble meat on a skewer. It was built in the 1920s and now houses
local government offices. The excellent Geographical Museum (Mon-Thurs
9am-2pm, Fri 9-11am, Sat 9am-1pm; free) is nearby at Jl Diponegoro 57,
and displays mountains of fossils, as well as several full dinosaur
skeletons, a four-metre mammoth skeleton and a replica of the skull of
the famous Java man.
About 750m west of the museum, Jalan Cihampelas, known to Westerners as
Jeans Street , is lined with shops selling cheap T-shirts, bags, shoes
and jeans (though these are no longer such a bargain). The shopfronts
themselves are adorned with a kitsch kaleidoscope of colossal plaster
superheroes, including Rambo, straddling spaceships and fluffy stucco
clouds.
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