Sea World and Ancol

On Saturday morning, I went to Ancol (an-chol), a neighborhood in northwest Jakarta, on the Java Sea. You have to pay to get into the neighborhood. I’m not sure how much, because I handed my cab driver some money and he paid for it and gave it back to me. It was a few thousand, I guess.

My first stop was Sea World. It’s a big aquarium. From what I could tell, there was only one show, which I think involved feeding the piranhas. There were a lot of people gathered around the piranha tank and a guy on a loudspeaker talking about something.

The rest of the tanks had different kinds of fish and sharks and eels, all colorful. The descriptions were in both Bahasa Indonesian and English, which was helpful. Most of the fish were local, found in the seas around the islands here. My favorite was the dugong. It’s in the same family as the extinct sea cow and the manatee, with a funny, aardvark kind of mouth, used for grazing grasses off the bottom of the ocean. It was huge, slow-moving, and sweet-looking. Its front fins are jointed. They can be used for swimming and also for shuffling along the bottom—walk, walk, drag.

There was a long tunnel where people stand on a slow-moving conveyor belt going along under a tank of fish and sea turtles and rays swimming around and over the tunnel. It was so cool when the rays would brush the top of the tunnel and I could see it’s white underside with its mouth and gills.

The last thing I did before I left was to touch a shark and a ray. It freaked me out a little bit, but they were swimming around in a small tank specifically for the purpose of being touched, so I figured I couldn’t be hurt by it. The shark was little and velvety, which surprised me, and the ray was slimy. I couldn’t bring myself to touch an eel or this spiky, wormy, looking thing. But I’m glad I touched the shark.

After Sea World, I walked through the park around it and over to the gondola ride, which took me across the theme-park part of Ancol. There is Sea World, another sea life place with dolphin and whale and sea lion shows, a water park, an amusement park, and a Universal Studios kind of place.

The other side of the gondola track exited into another park, where I walked along the water and was solicited for boat rides and tours. I thought the sailing trip sounded great. It was a half-hour for 10,000 rupiah and it included lunch. I was by myself but thought I might come back sometime with friends. Then, I sat down in an outdoor café and had a Sprite and watched as the boat attempted to sail out from it’s dock. They raised the sail and went straight into the wind, getting bumped about by the waves and not moving an inch. I still want to go sailing, but maybe I’ll look around for some more experience sailors first.

In the neighborhood of Ancol on the other side of theme park central there are some historic sites, like a maritime museum and a fish market. I decided to save that for another day because the sun was hotter than I’ve ever felt before and my housemates texted me and asked me to join them for lunch back in my neighborhood. Besides, I should probably get to the fish market early because by mid-day I imagine it’s quite smelly!