'Macet' is not just a jam, it is a way of life.

    If there is one thing I have learned about living in Indonesia it is that everything is not as it seems but somehow exactly how it seems.  A full contradiction yes, but in that is a true sense of Jakarta.  It is horribly apparent how spoiled I am to have grown up in a country that has traffic laws and abides in them, uses actual solutions to problems other than covering them up only to appear fixed,  and I can drink water from the hose on a hot day.  Jakarta is a swirling mess of chaos that seems to carry on yet somehow works.

     Two days ago I had the fantastic opportunity to be stuck in a five hour traffic jam coming down the side of a mountain without moving an inch. The whole journey took eight hours to get from point A to B.  The same trip, mind you, only took two hours when we first went. Perhaps the best part of the story is the abhorring bout of food poisoning I have ever had in my life, and I have been known to have a few really good stories about me and an irritable bowl in an exceptionally inconvenient time (ie Disney World 2007). Anyone who has had food poisoning knows how terrifying it is to be more than twenty feet from a toilet, let alone getting on a rickety bus, or on a supposed two hour bus ride, or in Indonesia, or amongst your administration and new friends; nobody wants to be know as ‘the guy who soiled himself on the bus’.

     I will spoil any thoughts of this story ending with me in total embarrassment and in need of a change of clothes to let you know thanks to  a wonderful cocktail of activated charcoal, excessive pepto tabs, tums, Imodium, and an unknown Indonesian intestinal pill, I haven’t needed a toilet in three days.  But nonetheless, I was unaware of how successful my full on assault against my gastrointestinal organs would be. As far as I knew, I was a time bomb, living life minute by minute in absolute terror and fear. 

     So I eased into my bus seat to try sleep through the bumps and tosses of the bus.  Busses here normally are stop and go, hard on the gas, hard on the brakes. Think late night taxi ride in Chicago. But as the stop went from moments to minutes, minutes to tens of minutes my heart sunk deeper and deeper until I felt it might actually be purged along with the rest of everything in my lower abdomen.

     By the time forty five minutes had passed, we were informed this could take a while So a few of us got off the bus and strolled amongst the roadside stalls that lined the mountainside. This would have been something right up my alley on any ordinary day. Very dodgey, yet perfectly simple stalls ran by non-english speaking men and women with worn in expressions, all set on a mountainside that doubled as a tea-plantation, with the sun beginning to set.  Perfect, almost. But as time passed into hour two of being stuck we knew we were in for the long haul.

     What I noticed as peculiar was that everyone seemed to carry on as normal. The line of cars backed up for probably miles, but not a shout of frustration or horn-usage. It simply was how things worked. If there were regularly five hour traffic jams without a good reason in the states, people would be sued, assaulted, or killed. But as drivers turned off their cars and lit their cigarettes, there wasn’t even an air of understanding or acceptance, it just was. Disgustingly clogged streets is how things work around here, it is know in Jakarta as ‘Macet’ [Mah-chet]. Its no different than a queue in the grocery store, or trying to get a vending machine to accept a wrinkled dollar bill, its just one of those things we have as part of life.

    As hour two passed to hour five, my friends got to sample some good local street food while I reluctantly passed. We watched the sun set over the mountains in a cramped tin roofed food stall, resting precariously on stilts as it hung over the hill. It turned out to be a nice afternoon, although at the time everyone was still trying to go with the flow (which in this case going with the flow actually meant just sitting there as the situation was flow-less). Once we started moving again, we felt exhilarated only to be stifled by a slow going three hour journey for the remainder of the drive. But we made it, and maybe we are a bit more patient and understanding as a result.

It will take a while to get used to the erratic normality of chaos in this city. It is constantly moving, and like being tossed overboard in a swift river, you’ve got to keep your feet in front of you and your eyes looking ahead. Its fun, but ultimately exhausting to foreigner. But hey, over here it’s the way life is, so I might as well get on on board the train, if only the city had one, so I guess I’ll hurry up and get on the bus prepared to wait in the ever present macet.