Jakarta Trip: BSD City

Inka, Irza and the whole family went back to Jakarta between 31 May and 12 June 2007 for a short holiday, making use of the kids' June school holiday. We left Singapore for Jakarta on Thursday, 31 May 2007. That day was a public holiday, Vesak Day, in Singapore. We took Lufthansa flight from Singapore to Jakarta, taking off from Changi airport at around 5:05pm, only 10 minutes behind schedule. We landed at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta (Cengkareng) airport at around 5:40pm local time. Some pictures at Changi airport and during the flight can be found here.

Sadly, it was *NOT* a public holiday in Jakarta. For some reason, Indonesians celebrated Vesak Day on Friday, 1 June 2007 instead. Don't know what caused this difference. I thought that day was also a public holiday in Jakarta, but it was not. Can you guess how did that matter to us?

Yes, you guessed it right. On a weekday, during evening's rush hour time, Jakarta's traffic is a nightmare. It took us a solid 2.5 hours to reach my parent's house in Cinere, south Jakarta, from the airport in west Jakarta. Traffic jam at the inner-ring-road expressway has started from Jelambar, all the way to Grogol, Tomang until we exit the expressway at Slipi. Luckily, the traffic jam on the subsequent route we took to Cinere (Slipi --> Pejompongan --> Pondok Indah --> Lebak Bulus --> Cinere) was not too bad, despite the underpass construction at Kebayoran Lama.

First Trip to BSD City

On our third day in Jakarta, we went to Ocean Park, the new water theme park located at BSD City, Serpong, Tangerang. This is the first time we visited BSD City. The water park is quite big, and the facilities and attractions are comparable to Singapore's Wild Wild Wet or Malacca's A'Famosa Water World, although it's still smaller than Kuala Lumpur's Sunway Lagoon. There are the lazy river circling around the area, wave pool, many types of slides and water-based children playgrounds.

The location is quite convenient, only around 30-40 minutes from my parents' home in Cinere, thanks to the Serpong Expressway which is now directly connected to the Outer Ring Road Expressway at Lebak Bulus. Similar to Wild Wild Wet in Singapore, Ocean Park BSD uses a smart card for visitors to make payments for the tickets as well as all the facilities inside the theme park, such as lockers and tubes rental.

The entrance tickets are 50,000 Indonesian rupiahs per person for both adults and children, with additional charges apply for locker and tube rentals. The kids were really having fun. Unfortunately, not many photos we took there since all of us were swimming so we needed to put all our belongings, including the camera, inside the lockers. Some of the photos can be found here.

After swimming, we went to BSD Plaza to have dinner at a nice seafood restaurant near the carpark. The food were great, and the price is surprisingly cheap. There were total 13 people of us, 8 adults and 5 children (including one baby) and the whole seafood meal only costs us around 400,000 Indonesian rupiahs, or around S$68.

Apologise, we didn't manage to take pictures of the grilled fish, fried fish, squid, crab and other dishes, since we were very hungry after swimming. My wife only managed to take the picture of the otak-otak. More pictures at the restaurant can be found here.

More reports from our "mudik" trip to Jakarta will follow. :)