Traffic around the world: Jakarta (Indonesia)

I had been giving private tuition to a group of Indonesian teenagers whose parents had sent them to Singapore for their education.  They kept telling me I must go and visit their country, so during the end-of-year school holidays in December, that was what I did, staying with student Honi Handaya’s family.

    On my second day, Honi took me out to explore Jakarta.

    The driving was hair raising, to put it mildly, with smaller vehicles like motorcycles, bicycles and becak trishaws weaving their suicidally fearless and reckless way in and out of the throng of buses and cars.

    Sitting in one of these becak trishaws, you are only at the level of the wheel of a bus, so it was very frightening to be about a hair’s breadth from these tons of metal thundering past.

    Also, the becak rider is behind the passenger, which means that the passenger doesn’t have the driver between him/her and the vehicle in front to take the impact of any collision.

    After that leg-wobbling experience, I suggested we take the bus instead.

    Honi took me to where a cluster of people were standing by the road.  That was the bus stop.  No post, no board with bus numbers, let alone a board setting out the routes (which we didn't have in Singapore at the time anyway, so I was used to this last element).  Just a bunch of people to mark the spot.  

    I asked Honi, “How do we know which bus is going where?”  She said, “The conductor will announce the stops.”

    Whenever a bus — unmarked on the front — arrived, the knot of people would surge forwards as it approached, looking expectantly and listening intently.

    The conductor would hang out of the door, shouting out the names of all the stops from that point on.

    Those who heard the name of their stop on the list would leap on.

    The rest would step back to wait for the next bus -- when the whole process would repeat itself.

    Hahahahahaha, quite mad, but most entertaining to watch!

(Jakarta, Indonesia, December 1973)

* becak [pronounced beh-tjak]:  from the Hokkien / Fujianese dialect pronunciation of 馬車 / 马车 mǎchē / “horse vehicle”.  (From googling) Quote A becak (pronounced beh-chak) is a traditional Indonesian three-wheeled pedicab or cycle rickshaw used for public transport. It features a front seat for one or two passengers and is powered by a driver paddling a bicycle from behind, offering a slow, open-air way to navigate urban neighborhoods. Unquote