This is from another post i wrote, roughly a year ago, also during the fasting month. The full post is available here.
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For the geographically challenged here’s a backgrounder: Indonesia is roughly three time zones longe from one end to the other, 250 million people of various colours, ethnics, religions, languages and sense of humour, scattered in random messy lumps on most of 17,000 islands. I’ve personally travelled very little in Indonesia but I been told it’s really beautiful.
Jakarta is its capital and very much its own world. In day time, the population is around 12 million people, half of them on motorbikes. The other half navigates life trying to dodge them. People seem to appear magically in Jakarta – you see them everywhere yet with no idea of where they live. One Half never see where the Other Half sleeps so estimates are always vague.
At night, the headcount is even more puzzling. Some say it’s 8 million, others 6 million, depending on how you count the poor people. Some parts of town are so dense the headcount was done by smell - it’s not always accurate.
Other parts of town are really nice and you generally need to register before getting into office and residential buildings. From the taller buildings, the lights spread out all the way to the end of the night, phallic monuments of urban living to one side and dark patches of sleeping masses in between. My house is on the south end where civilized people live and keep pets – (they still eat dogs on some parts of town).
Connecting this massive sprawls of fuzzy headcounts, is a network of paraplegically maintained and tragically ill designed road system, populated exclusively by idiots, riding and wheeling incompetently on every moving device ever developed in the industrialized world. The system as a whole is inadequately policed by one of the most corrupt law enforcement agency in the country and the result is a paralyzing traffic in every definition of the word. Some World Bank economists thought it contributed to the national growth rate – currently stalled at 6%.
Traffic jam is a sub-culture to the new generation. Ancient Javanese travelers notoriously failed the notion of time since they lacked any accurate measuring instruments, Jakarta Urbanites encounter a practical condition that renders any such technologies irrelevant. The new generation are more flexible in their interpretation and more practical in their time management. It’s worthwhile: the good times always seem longer.
Sucks when you have to wait, tho.
I am clinically allergic to idling in traffic jams and with the luxury of a non-employment, I generally schedule my life around it. Other people have sex in the traffic. Girls bring special shoes to handle manual clutch. Radios have traffic update and roadie talk shows. There are food, cigarette, flowers and cold drink vendors along the main roads for the commuters comfort. During the fasting month, at six o’clock, the jammed masses stop trafficking and eat food, with their engine running.
On main intersections, you could also purchase maps, dictionaries, floating devices, mechanical robots and weird strange living real mammals that look an awful lot like little beasts from the endangered species list.
Motorbike is a chronic and serious issue and it needs to be dealt with. Anyone who could ride a motorbike can ride a motorbike while typing down an sms message. I strongly urge Jakarta Urbanites to visit Hanoi to fully visualize the potentially overwhelming chaos of too many motorbikes.
If you survived the traffic, next is to deal with the flood. Jakarta doesn’t have a drainage system and floods seasonally. During such times, you ride special buses - or boats - to the flooded gates of the airport if you needed to fly out (common sense dictates that you attempted to do that at least once).
Stuck in a flooded traffic jam is the very definition of 'proper fucked'. You're it.
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The 2nd part is here - i'm putting this up and wondering at how is it almost nothing changed over a year.
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