Bekasi

A free day in Bekasi at Situ Rawa Gede, Pura Agung and Summarecon

A free day in Bekasi works if you plan around heat and traffic. Go early to Situ Rawa Gede lake in Rawalumbu, once a dumping ground and now cleaned up, for pedal boats and bamboo rafts, visit the Balinese Pura Agung temple, and spend the evening in the Summarecon district's malls and food courts.

Nobody needs long in Bekasi, but a free day can be filled well if you plan around the heat and the traffic.

The lake was a dumping ground until the city cleaned it up; now families rent pedal boats and the bale kambang, a bamboo raft floated on plastic drums, for a short paddle. Gazebos around the edge give shade, and there is a simple restaurant.

Late morning. Take a car to Pura Agung Tirta Bhuana, built around 1992 for the city's Balinese and Hindu community. Visitors are welcome outside prayer times if dressed modestly; a sash around the waist is usually lent at the gate.

Afternoon. Retreat from the heat into Summarecon Mall Bekasi or Metropolitan Mall, or ride the LRT from Bekasi Barat into Jakarta for an afternoon at the National Museum or Monas.

Evening. Summarecon Bekasi's boulevards are at their best after dark, with outdoor restaurants and families strolling. On a match night, head instead to Stadion Patriot Candrabhaga in South Bekasi. Finish in the shophouse rows of Kemang Pratama or Galaxy for late noodles, satay or seafood.

Gabus pucung, nasi uduk and the Kemang Pratama food strip

Bekasi cooks Betawi food with Sundanese influence. The local dish is gabus pucung, snakehead fish in a black keluak-nut soup, earthy and slightly bitter and hard to find outside Betawi kitchens. Nasi uduk, coconut rice with sides, is the breakfast, and the Kemang Pratama strip has the best choice of evening stalls.

Bekasi's own cooking is Betawi, the food of Jakarta's original people, with Sundanese influence from the West Java hinterland. The dish most tied to the area is gabus pucung: snakehead fish, a freshwater fish once common in the local swamps, cooked in a black soup coloured by keluak nuts. It is earthy, a little bitter and hard to find outside Betawi kitchens, so try it if you see it written on a warung board.

Breakfast is nasi uduk, rice steamed in coconut milk and lemongrass, sold at dawn near markets and stations with fried tempeh, egg, shredded omelette and peanut sambal. Soto Betawi, beef soup with coconut milk, and sayur asem, a sour tamarind vegetable soup, fill lunchtime plates at simple rumah makan. Sticky dodol Betawi, a dense sweet of glutinous rice, coconut milk and palm sugar stirred for hours, is made in large batches before Lebaran.

For variety, the shophouse rows are the answer. Ruko Kemang Pratama, across from two of the city's big schools, packs dozens of places side by side: noodle shops, Padang restaurants, Chinese-Indonesian seafood and cafés. Summarecon and Harapan Indah have newer coffee shops and restaurant clusters, and every mall has a food court with the big Indonesian chains.

Street stalls appear along the main roads after 5 pm, selling martabak, satay and fried snacks to commuters on the way home.

How Bekasi got its name, from Tarumanagara to Kota Patriot

Bekasi is one of the oldest named places in Java despite the toll roads. In the fifth century it belonged to Tarumanagara, whose king Purnawarman left Sanskrit inscriptions; historians link the Candrabhaga river named on the Tugu stone with Bekasi, and the city later earned the nickname Kota Patriot for its independence fighters.

It is hard to believe among the toll roads, but this is one of the oldest named places in Java. In the fifth century the area belonged to Tarumanagara, an early Hindu kingdom whose king, Purnawarman, left inscriptions in Sanskrit. The Tugu stone, found near Jakarta's harbour and now in the National Museum, names two rivers, the Candrabhaga and the Gomati. Historians link Candrabhaga to Bekasi: chandra means moon in Sanskrit, and the Old Sundanese word for moon is sasi, which turned the name into Bhagasasi. Dutch clerks later wrote it as Bacassie, and Bekasi stuck.

Under the colonial government the area was a land of private estates growing rice and sugar, with landlords controlling the villages. That history fed the resistance after 1945, when Bekasi sat on the front line between Republican fighters and the returning Dutch around Jakarta. The struggle earned it the title Kota Patriot, still on the city's crest and the stadium's name.

Bekasi City was carved out of Bekasi Regency on 16 December 1996, as Jakarta's growth turned rice fields into housing estates. Today the regency to the north and east holds Cikarang's vast industrial parks, while the city has become a bedroom for the capital. Little physical history survives, so the story lives mostly in names: the Candrabhaga on the stadium and the river that still floods the low ground every wet season.