Yesterday was one of "those" days that makes you understand why some people hate to travel. My flight from Bangkok to Jakarta was delayed by half an hour, which is bad enough, but when I got to Jakarta I found that my connecting flight to Semarang was delayed by more than an hour. This gave me more than enough time to fully "appreciate" Soekarno-Hatta airport.

Jakarta’s main international airport is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, it is an architecturally distinctive airport. In an age when new airports are almost always glass and steel could-be-anywhere designs, Soekarno-Hatta, although made mostly of glass and steel, is inspired by local cultural styles, with the departure lounges taking the form of traditional pendopo meeting places set in landscaped tropical gardens.

On the other hand, the experience delivered to the travellers who have to use the airport is far from culturally enriching. On exiting customs, you’re assaulted with an absolute free-for-all of competing unlicensed taxi drivers, touts and assorted other unsavoury characters. If, like me, you’re arriving on an international flight and transferring to a domestic flight, you won’t find a single sign inside to direct you to the domestic terminal. Finally, if faced with a delayed flight, you won’t find much to do to occupy your time. The domestic terminal has little in the way of internet services or other things to do.

It’s no wonder that the budget travel site Sleeping in Airports named Soekarno-Hatta a "Poopy Airport" in 2006.

So, after a long day, I arrived in Semarang, on the north coast of Central Java. It’s my first time here, but as I walk out of the airport building I got a distinct feeling of deja vu. I suspect that most provincial airports in Indonesia were originally built on the same plan. The arrivals hall in Semarang is more or less identical to the ones in Makassar, Yogyakarta and Surabaya’s old terminal.