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Hidden among the concrete and haze, there are a few reminders that Jakarta was once a jungle.
The giant trees towering above the inner city suburb of Menteng, their trunks the girth of a small car.
Heavy red mud that grips your shoe and hardens like cement, until you need a chisel to chip it off.
And then there's the wildlife: birds mostly, although my colleague David Anderson once peered over a neighbour's fence to investigate a strange noise and discovered a python in the throes of swallowing a cat.
I didn't believe him, until he showed me the photo.
In my back garden there's a family of tiny bats that sleep all day on the underside of a banana palm frond.
And at dawn and dusk songbirds emerge to feed on the garden's insects.
One day, I hear a bird singing when I arrive home from work. There, beneath the banana trees is a dark-feathered bird in a cage. It wasn't there this morning, and neither was the cage.
"A bird," I say to Iwan, our guard.
"Yes," he says. He's very excited about it. "It's a very special bird," he says, in Indonesian. "It's a good singer. It's worth a lot of money."
Birds in cages are everywhere
He caught it in our backyard and he's going to sell it. He already has some buyers interested.
I'm troubled by this. I've never liked seeing even canaries in cages, and I hate the idea of a wild bird caught and confined.
But most Indonesians don't share my attitude.
Jakarta is full of birds in cages, hanging outside homes, under shop awnings, in parks, even on the back of motorbikes, as their owners transport them around the city, the birds sheltered from the wind by custom made shields.
But this bird has been caught at my house. It would still be flying around, but for the cunning bird catcher Iwan.
He must have caught it with a net. I lie awake thinking about it that night, and make a resolution.
The next morning I approach him: "Iwan, about the bird. I am not happy that you caught it here."
He looks back at me, wearing an expression that the Javanese have perfected: totally unreadable.
I assume he's thinking about the $10 or $20 he thought he was going to make from selling the bird: an easy day's wages.
"Australians do not trap wild birds," I explain to him, through a translator. "I don't want you catching more birds in the garden".
Iwan says he didn't catch it, it flew into his room. I think: Yeah, right.
"It's not your fault — you did not know how I felt about this," I add. "And I know that Indonesians like keeping birds."
I decide to buy the bird's freedom
"So, I want to free the bird. I will buy it from you and let it go."
His expression shifts. I swear the corners of his mouth move.
"How much do you want for the bird?"
I have now broken a crucial principle of negotiation: informing the seller that I'll buy the product before agreeing on a price.
Iwan looks back at me. "Dua juta."
"Two million rupiah," I squawk. That's $200 — or about two thirds of a typical Jakartan's monthly wage.
"That's a bloody expensive bird," I say.
"It's a very good singer," Iwan says.
In an instant I've gone from feeling sorry for Iwan to a firm belief that I've been scammed.
I go inside and count out the cash. I'm fuming as I pile the red banknotes out onto the table.
I decide that as I'm his boss I can get away with a discount — I'll pay him $150 for a bird that was happily flying around the garden yesterday.
What's he doing catching birds anyway? He's supposed to be guarding the house. I walk outside with the money.
"If you want to catch something Iwan, catch the rats and the cats. Leave the birds alone," I say.
I hand over the cash and he pulls the bird out of its cage. My three-year-old son has been watching all this and is now trying to grab hold of the bird. He's screaming, "bird, bird bird."
The bird's pecking Iwan's hands. If my son gets it the bird's freedom will be extremely short-lived. I'm feeling like the most gullible person in Indonesia.
We carry it into the backyard and Iwan lets it go. It flies up, over the house, and out of sight, free as a bird — a very expensive bird.
Turns out murais have quite a price tag
Later I decide to investigate Iwan's claim. I go to Pasar Pramuka, the main Jakarta bird market.
It's noisy and colourful. There are pigeons, canaries, parrots and in a big cage, hanging from the roof, the pride of the market, a black and white songbird called a murai.
I speak to a young bird dealer, Nurkhan.
"There are many kinds of murai," he says.
"The more beautiful they are, the more beautifully they sing, the price would reach Rp 100 million."
That's $10,000.
The murai in the market is on sale for $2,000.
I have a sinking feeling. I pull out my phone and show him a photo of Iwan's bird.
"Oh my, that's a murai!" Nurkhan says.
"That bird is from Sumatra. Untrained, they are valued at 3 to 4 million."
That's $300-400. So Iwan wasn't full of it. But what about his claim that it just flew into his room?
"It must have been hungry," Nurkhan says.
"That bird must have been owned by somebody. Somebody must have just bought the bird in the market, took it home and accidentally had the cage door opened maybe and the bird got away. "
I was wrong; now the murai is probably starving
I tell him that I released the bird. There's a second's silence.
"You let it go! It can't get food on its own. If you let it go in the forest, then it can get its own food. But if you release it in the city it can't."
None of this is good news: I've robbed Iwan of a huge windfall, and now the murai is starving.
"Probably other people would catch it. A free flying murai, people would be so excited if they knew. They would look for it and catch it. That bird has a price tag on it," Nurkhan says.
What does he think of what I did? He gives me the Javanese response: polite and ambiguous.
"Well some [people] would think that it was a stupid thing to do because murai is valuable," he says.
"But maybe some people would also think that it's better to let them go because they don't want to take care of it — it would all depend on who looks at it."
But I know what he's really thinking: this guy freed a murai — what an idiot.
Topics: birds, human-interest, indonesia
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