From Our Correspondent:
Walking with Kuta
Jakarta at the end of a leash
By WARREN CARAGATA

October 27, 2000

The travel guides never mention this, but if you want to really get to know a place, get a dog. My wife and I bought Kuta, a golden retriever, a few months after we settled in Jakarta. Since then, on our regular, usually nocturnal, walks, dog in tow (or vice versa), I have seen another face of this sprawling, sometimes maddening, city. It is a face with infinitely more charm than the Jakarta you see from your car inching through traffic, surrounded by the belching, blackened tail pipes of clapped-out buses.

We live in a south Jakarta district that is home to expatriates and wealthy Indonesians (a former Suharto minister owns the house next door, though he doesn�t live there), as well as ordinary folk crowded into kampungs that always remind me of country villages rather than urban neighborhoods. Before we got the dog, I would take occasional walks through the kampungs but always felt like an outsider, a voyeur, the wealthy bule (white person) stealing a look at how the rest of Indonesia lives. It was an entirely self-inflicted response but the emotion was real and stopped me from exploring my new home. Kuta has changed all that.

Walking the dog has given me an excuse I never had before to go places I would have avoided pre-dog. And for night-time walks, Kuta offers some sense of reassurance as we wander deeper into the night, further and further away from home, although with an always friendly golden retriever - and a young one at that - the sense of security is probably misplaced. Muslims consider dogs unclean, and given the canine penchant for meticulously cleaning every part of it body, I must admit the judgement some merit. The upshot of this is that dogs are not a common sight on Indonesian streets. In fact, in the first few months of his life, Kuta had never seen another dog, even though he had befriended the local goats, met the neighborhood geese, and longed to give chase to the chickens and mangy, docked-tail cats that seem to spend all their time eating garbage strewn along the roadsides or piled in carts waiting its eventual pickup. The dogs that are around are guard versions mostly, identified only by growls and deep barking from behind concrete walls.

So it is not surprising that most people are afraid of dogs, even a golden retriever puppy on a short leash. They usually keep some distance, though kids generally follow us along the streets, all yelling excitedly as we pass, as though Kuta were some forbidden fruit on four feet, managing impossibly to be both cute and frightening at the same time. When we stop, they gather round, the brave ones circling behind the dog to quickly touch his back. They all want to know his name, where he was born, and, frequently, whether he has had his own children yet (no and probably never, the answer to that last one). And there are endless comments before we take our leave on how big he is, and how soft his coat from the ones who dared give him a tentative pat.

The kids are great but I am fondest of the night-time walks, when they are not normally around. It is cooler, first of all, which both Kuta and I like. The people on our usual after-dinner route all know his name by now and call out friendly greetings to both of us. Late evenings, the streets of the neighborhood belong to the security guards, perched in their flat-footed squat, smoking clove cigarettes, and clusters of teenagers playing guitar or dominoes or chatting. There are also the fast-food carts, lit by hissing kerosene lamps. All the vendors of sate or noodles or whatever else use a special sound to identify what they have on offer. My favorite is the noodle vendor, rhythmically tapping a piece of bamboo as he walks, an echoing, hollow sound that can usually be heard before he appears out of the gloom of the Jakarta night. These are all now memories that I hope now will last forever, the pools of light punctuating the tropical darkness, the hiss of the kerosene lamps, the bamboo tapping, the cheery greetings of my new friends, and the tug on the leash when Kuta spies a cat in the distance.