Just don't tell my mother

I eluded to the splendors of Jakarta in my last blog. It's not an easy city to navigate. It sprawls on for miles and miles in under passes, over passes, traffic circles, and u-turns, and every square inch of that is covered with hurling buses, bumbling bajai (motorized rickshaw), jammed mirkolets (minibuses - same concept as the jeepney from PI), taxis, lima kaki (men pushing mobile food stands) and hundreds and thousands of motorbikes. At any give moment of any given day, there is a traffic jam somewhere in the city that looks something like this:

Bumper to bumper traffic. The government is working on this problem. The bus system has its own lane, there are talks of restarting a failed mono-rail project, and they even made public schools start a half hour earlier to relieve some congestion. The ominous projection, though, is that Jakarta will be grid-locked by 2012. The authors of Culture Shock: Jakarta give this advice about getting about the city: Don't. I can understand their stand point. Any plans I might have for a Friday night in the city fizzle out quickly as I survey the unmoving glow of taillights from my balcony.  

Yesterday, I was determined to meet some friends for dinner at a mall that is about a 15 minute drive from my apartment (with no traffic). I walked out to the street to check the traffic situation and devise a plan for catching a taxi. Things looked pretty hopeless. Traffic wasn't moving. My only hope was to walk to another street and hope the situation was marginally better. Well, this wasn't true. There was another solution, one that I'd been avoiding since I arrived in Jakarta: The Ojek.

So, the only vehicles that move in a traffic jam are motorbikes that squeeze and weave through any space available (usually the side of the road or the sidewalk). There are many bike owners in Jakarta who take advantage of the desperate traffic situation by offering a helmet and a ride for a pretty cheap fee. These entrepreneurs can be found on just about any street corner usually under a crude cardboard sign that announces their presence. Ojek - the motorbike taxi.

My fears about taking an ojek were not unfounded. We were warned during orientation to never take them. They're just too dangerous. They can and will take advantage of any available space on the road, putting themselves and their fare inches away from other vehicles. But given that most Indonesians don't think twice about them, that the girl in my post before me took them without any troubles, and that sitting in a taxi for hours as the meter rolls is really, really frustrating, it was time for me to make friends with the ojek.

I was weighing these pros and cons once again in my head as I walked to the next street. Before I could even summon the courage to go looking for an ojek, one came to me. A young man on a bike pulled up to the curb with the familiar, "Ojek, Miss?" Why not? I did a quick check of the bike (looking for what, I don't know), asked him the fare to the mall, and took the helmet from his hands. And we were off!

We did all the things that ojeks do: weaved between cars in spaces that appeared only slightly bigger then my foot, rode up over sidewalks, and came close enough to buses that I could have shaken hands with the passengers who hung from the doorway. I kept a cool facade, but my inner monologue sounded something like this: "Please don't let me die. My mother is going to kill me. Huzzah! I'm going to want those kneecaps later.  Please don't let me die. Do I hold on to him? Bus! Nice move. Haha...suckers. Maybe I'll just hold on back here. Please don't let me die"

Despite all my reservations, I arrived safely at my destination in a mere 30 minutes (it could easily have been four times that in a taxi). I paid my driver and walked away with the same grin and feeling I have any time I figure out one more piece of Jakarta. I did it. Slowly, I'm finding my way to be independent in this crazy metropolis. Just don't tell my mother.