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Last weekend I got the opportunity to undertake another of my Indonesian politician-style comparative study tours. AirAsia once again supplied me with a great value flight and some simply appalling in-flight coffee, as I hopped over the briny to Kuala Lumpur in order to take in this year’s Malaysian Grand Prix.

My trip to last year’s Singapore Grand Prix gave me a chance to compare the island state’s sweeping boulevards and cyber-conformist hygiene with Jakarta’s pungently aromatic demographic implosion, and I was hoping that KL would offer some similarly enlightening contrasts.

KL has been described to me as midway between Jakarta and Singapore, although the fact that both Malaysia and Singapore host Grands Prix, while Jakarta doesn’t, can perhaps tell you all you need to know about the three cities’ relative urban credentials.

Indonesia’s largest sporting event is the Commonwealth Bank tennis tournament, which is held in Bali every year. This does indeed attract a few big names, but it certainly isn’t a big international event, although a certain rogue tax official has been so keen to attend in the past he’s sprung himself from jail and donned a ludicrous Beatles wig as a disguise.

In any case, down at the AirAsia terminal at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, everything was a Formula 1 frenzy, presumably because AirAsia supremo and Malaysian mogul extraordinaire Tony Fernandes now owns his very own Formula 1 team (in fact, he’s revived the iconic Lotus brand). An expensive hobby, perhaps, but presumably Mr. F. isn’t short of a few ringgit.

Kuala Lumpur’s airport is roughly twice as far from the center of town as Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta, however, it lies a mere 10-minute bus ride away from the Sepang Circuit. And so it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting on a lush, green hillside, necking Tiger beer and watching all of the Saturday qualifying action. Sepang is a great place that affords spectators some simply superb views of all those high-speed dogfights.

After qualification was over, I had a stroll around the overpriced merchandise stalls (although there was a 50 percent discount on Michael Schumacher T-shirts — ha, ha and furthermore, ha). I then headed into KL Central to hook up with a couple of my F1-loving chums who had also made the hop over from the Big Durian for the race, and we all headed out for a little Saturday night fever.

The center of KL is perhaps closer in essence to Singapore than it is to Jakarta, and a few things stand out immediately to any visiting long-term Batavia warriors. First, the traffic doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad as the purgatorial gridlock we all know and love. The lack of motorcycles in particular makes for a pleasant change. The second thing that struck me as we walked around KL is perhaps not entirely unrelated to the first. While Jakarta engages in endless debates about the city’s actual and fantasized Gordian transportation knot of cars, busways, monorails, new overpasses and even bicycle lanes, the most fundamental mode of human transportation, namely Shanks’s pony (or getting up off one’s rear end and walking), has been sadly neglected.

Developed urban centers usually feature those amazing technological innovations known as sidewalks and, as a knock-on effect, there are bustling streets filled with shops and the like. Jakarta’s fancy shops are all safely buried within the closeted, safe, technocratic womb of the shopping mall, while outside a post-apocalyptic urban assault course of crumbling concrete, 30-year-old buses, raw sewage and underclass serfs serves to deter any integrated urban renaissance.

Coincidentally enough, I have just read that Rp 500 trillion ($58 billion) has been earmarked by the government for infrastructure development across the country. I reckon that by the time a multitude of greedy politicos have dipped their avaricious mitts into the honeypot, there will be just about enough dough remaining for a couple of Keep Left signs.

Meanwhile, back in KL, Sunday came around and we all headed back to Sepang for a highly enjoyable race that actually featured a fair amount of overtaking. Wonders will never cease. The next day, it was time for the inevitable lemming-like tourist traipse around Kuala Lumpur Tower and the Petronas Twin Towers. As iconic as the Twin Towers have now become, they are basically just two large slabs of steel and concrete. Whatever happened to architectural creativity in our modern world? The entire thrust of modern architectural hubris seems to be to raise your non-idea of a building 15 stories higher than the neighboring country’s non-idea of a building.

Personally, I’d like to see Indonesia’s putative and scandalously extravagant new legislative office building being constructed as a Gothic pastiche and filled with pointed arches and flying buttresses. Such a design would more fittingly reflect the medieval, Machiavellian mind-set of those who will be ensconced inside it, enjoying a shiatsu while they scan the year’s budget allocations to see what can be craftily diverted into their Citibank accounts. Gothic Jakarta, now that would be infrastructure to be proud of.

 

Simon Pitchforth is the editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.