"I'M SORRY, WAS I SHOUTING?"

Indonesia can be a truly beautiful land. You're probably imagining walking alone on pristine beaches or dipping your toes into a blue ocean, you might envision angry volcanoes or maybe a plethora of wildlife and rainforest canopies. These are all true depictions of this amazing country yet there are contradictions too, often separating the rural from the urban.

dredging rivers for the first time since the 1970's

These differences show themselves in a variety of ways The first of which is how, if you live in or visit the capital, that the Jakarta government can spend buckets of money cleaning up the waterways of the capital in an effort to reduce the annual flooding, yet at the same time not address the problem of trash and litter which is one of the primary causes of the blockages in the first place. There are absolutely no meaningful attempts to encourage recycling or repackaging and you will very quickly tire of seeing unbelievable ignorance in the form of plastic containers being casually tossed from car windows. This ignorance is not the consequence of a lack of either education or means as the behaviour comes from both public minibus  angkots and Mercedes alike.
There is a heartbreak attached to looking out over a sea of beautiful rice paddies, being tended by men and women in coolie hats which encourages you to consider simpler, earlier times but this image is then shattered by glancing slightly left and seeing a festering pile of plastic filled refuse. This is something many visitors to the 5-star hotels of Bali rarely see but something those who choose to travel into the heartlands will be only too acutely aware of.

a common sight in Jakarta

With the fourth largest population in the world, it often appears to visitors that the majority of Indonesia's residents believe that having a large family takes precedence over managing the resources needed to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of people living here. This lack of foresight then rears its head in the expanding borders of cities, need for housing and related facilities and the consequent reduction in green areas. According to statistics published by The World Bank, Indonesia's child mortality rate (under 5's) has dropped from 226 deaths per thousand live births in 1960 to just 27 in 2015 so the excuse of having big families to replace siblings who would statistically die really doesn't apply anymore. Increasingly,

I'd like to say this is unusual..it's not

the inability to care for, educate, and provide working opportunities to the populace provides the observer with too many examples of poverty such as beggars and sex trade workers, eager to make whatever living they can. Organised religions need to take their share or responsibility for this irresponsibility as much as the government.

This growing population also needs to be mobile as living in satellite cities and commuting to work requires transportation. Rather than focus on improving public transport, until recently the contradiction, unbelievably, was to even go so far as to make cheap, small engine cars available as an alternative to motorbikes, and this is on roads already congested and often gridlocked due to a lack of investment, lack of control over the quality and administration of the vehicles and owners, and the policing of these things. That many of Indonesia's roads are toll roads, one wonders how the money taken at the toll gates is used.

new toll gate in Karawaci made traffic worse

A nation suffering issues relating to health, Indonesia continues to make cheap, unhealthy food available to the masses and providing poor medical services to take care of a population is increasingly showing a gap between the haves and have nots.

Yet these contradictions, which are perfectly visible to, and well known by Indonesians, are passed off as "well, it's Indonesia" as if this caveat is a perfectly acceptable excuse. The problems are obviously heightened around the major cities whose reputations attract more and more people to flock towards the bright lights and potential rewards, but as with the story of Dick Whittington, the streets are more likely to be cess-pits than they are to be paved with gold. Every year the government go so far as to send a begging message to people on their way back from the annual Ramadan/Idul Fitri holiday not to come unless you have a job and lodgings.

Of course there are glimmers of hope. For the first time since the 1970's and as can be seen in the earlier photograph, the government is actually dredging the Jakarta waterways of the crap that is blocking them, something previous governments completely overlooked. Also Jakarta is finally going to have an LRT (light rail transit) and an MRT (mass rapid transit) train system in the next couple of years. But whether this is too little, too late will be the review of successive generations and with recent talk of moving the capital city to alternative locations which will surely only take the problems with it, One can only imagine the challenges facing those future generations.

Indonesia has in its hands the means to fundamentally address these issues. Clean up the high-level corruption that clogs the wheels of change and start employing people who can and will address the increasing problems. Clean up the police force and focus its attention on stopping the daily activities that snowball into ridiculous actions by Indonesians too long used to being allowed to get away with whatever they feel like. Get the religious leaders together to show that the abhorrent hardliners, whose pathetic attempts to unify the population over negative issues that will only divide the country further, will not work. At the same time, have those same religious leaders help to promote an understanding of what needs to be done with the social issues that are obvious influencing factors, and explain, using pictures where necessary, why. Dystopian futures are not science fiction, they are rapidly becoming science fact, we need actions to complement words.

Finally, and to finish this piece on contradictions on a lighter note, why is it that some Indonesians, who are averse to raising voices at the best of times, when in a quiet room insist on communicating with their friends/colleagues by shouting? Beats me...

A little bit of physics and a lot of luck

Have you ever fallen over? By accident I mean, not drunk? Depending on where and how, you know, raised paving stone, or misjudging distance for instance, it usually hurts like hell and bruises both body and, depending on whether you have an audience or not, ego equally.

Lets take it to the next level. Fallen off of something? Like a bicycle? Skateboard? Rollerskates? escalator? Grazed knees and hands are a minimum and I guess egos are again only bruised depending on the level of showoffiness.

Next step up, what about bumping into someone? Not in the metaphorical sense, I mean actually crashing body parts into body parts, and not in a bedroom sense either. It could be two people bending over to pick the same thing up and banging heads, or maybe concentrating too much on that Tinder profile while walking that you don't see the person coming in the other direction. Hurts.

At the centre of all of these events you will find physics and the numerous laws and principles that define the nature and properties of matter and energy such as Newton's First Law of Motion where A body continues in its state of constant velocity (which may be zero) unless it is acted upon by an external force. Thank you Big Bang Theory.

Now science was never my strong point so don't beat me up if, for instance, thermodynamics are also involved in any of those situations I described, it's just a device to bring me to the main part of this blog post. I was knocked off my motorbike on my way home from work two nights ago.

I've been carried from rugby fields, been struck by cricket balls and dislocated my shoulder trying to accomplish an eskimo roll in a kayak. I've crashed cars, fallen off bicycles, bruised my spine in a speedboat, been down to my last seconds of air while scuba diving and broke my big toe kicking a punching bag while learning Ju-Jitsu. But I've never been involved in a motorbike accident before.

I'm not sure that I overthink things but I definitely do think about things. When I decided to start riding a motorbike I was living in Chiang Mai in early 2009. It was a popular way to travel in a city with plenty of traffic, but organised road systems, and the decision to take the automatic moped rather than the Honda Phantom was decided as much by inexperience and price-per-day as it was by wanting to ride a mini Harley. I seriously wanted to ride the Phantom, I just didn't know how. Technically I didn't know how to ride the moped either but since it was fully automatic the worst thing I could do was over-rev the throttle.

which one would you choose?

A lot of my school mates (when I was a kid, not now I'm a teacher) rode 50cc motorbikes, I passed that by and went straight to driving cars. So with over 20 years of car driving experience, riding my first bike was fun but guided by common sense and an awareness that the protective cage around me had now disappeared. I also have a clear understanding of The Highway Code.

On arriving in Indonesia I was back on a bike inside a year but the conditions were remarkably different. I was still riding a fully automatic moped but the conditions of the roads; potholes, increased traffic, lack of signs, made riding a different challenge. South East Asia, with the possible exception of Korea (http://www.korea4expats.com/article-traffic-laws.html), also has a notable lack of Highway Codes. This means that rules of the road are more arbitrarily interpreted, by both drivers and authorities alike.

That video was of a toll road which doesn't allow the use of motorbikes, except in times of flooding... in some areas... maybe.

For a better idea of motorbikes, here's a video from Surabaya...

What was interesting in the second video is that most people are wearing helmets and not using mobile phones, this isn't necessarily the case in Tangerang and Jakarta.

These videos highlight that a person's understanding of road etiquette is only useful if the other users have the same respect. Where there is a lack of understanding, there is a driving test, where there is a flouting or disregard of the rules, there is the police and courts. So what happens if you find yourself in a country that has neither?

Of course I'm being argumentative. Indonesia does have a driving test but it is not essential to being able to drive. The driving licence may be purchased, illegally, and speaking to friends it would appear that a significant number of people go through this route. An equal proportion of people don't even bother to get an illegal driving licence, they just hope not to be stopped.

So what happens if you do get stopped by the police? Well in that case you just hand them the vehicle documentation and a folded up bank note and hope to talk your way out of anything. The highly unlikely worst case scenario is that if the policeman doesn't take the cash then it will mean a trip to the courthouse in the area in which you were stopped to pay an elevated fine.

Let me be clear, this is not some indignant tirade against the country in which I have lived for 6 years, rather it is an explanation of how things work. I now ride a Honda CBR 250cc motorbike, equipped with anti-lock brakes that I paid extra for and of all of the things that I have mentioned, the single biggest thing that I have taken into account before riding a bike and while riding a bike, is other drivers and what they might do. Indonesians are not bad people, they are a product of conditioning as we all are and where road use is concerned this area is not good.

Have you ever had that feeling, when sometimes you just know that something is going to hit you, or at the very least may hit you. Sometimes you just know you're going to be in trouble. That didn't happen to me. I approached a roundabout fully expecting that someone in the right hand lane may, instead of going all the way around to the last exit, may indeed head straight on, I was also aware that it was equally possible for a person in that right hand lane to pull off the stupidest of moves and turn left across the inside lane. I was in the inside lane, had slowed to take these things into account and then BANG! I'm lying on the road with a truck still seemingly trying to continue forward over my prone body, the only thing stopping this being the frame of my bike.

This truck had done just that, moved from the inside right to turn left at the roundabout. So even with all of my preparedness I still got hit. That I escaped with a swollen elbow and superficial cuts and bruises was down to the lack of speed on the part of myself and the truck.

Furthermore, the indicators on the truck weren't working, the truck driver had no STNK (vehicle documents) only a police slip proving the confiscation of those documents for the truck being pulled over earlier for another offense. In a slight case of irony, trucks are not even supposed to be on this particular road.

What would happen in the UK in this instance is that police would be called to the scene, drivers would exchange insurance documents, and injured parties would be taken, if necessary by ambulance, to a hospital.

What happened in my case was that I was assisted from my position by approximately 20 people, including local security guards, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. As I was able to stand and speak, and fortunately being only 2 minutes from home, I called Uchiel, my wife, to come and help out with language difficulties. The outcome was that the four guys in the cab admitted liability and agreed to attend a local garage to review the damage and agree on the amount to be paid. Insurance isn't mandatory in Indonesia, which means that most don't have it so "negotiations" are carried out privately. (http://www.expat.or.id/info/insurance.html)

The following day, the driver and his mate appeared at our house on return from the repairs garage and, having pleaded poverty, agreed to pay half of the total repair cost which they transferred electronically into our account there and then.

This post should serve as both information and a warning for what to expect in this situation. Had I not had the benefit of someone I knew at the scene, it would have been branded my fault just through me being a foreigner. Had I been more badly injured, who knows what would have happened. What I do know is that had the police been involved it would have cost us money too and we probably wouldn't have received any money toward the cost of the repair.

I choose to ride a bike. I enjoy it, it's easier to get from A-B in heavy traffic and I am aware of the pitfalls. Will I stop riding a bike? No. Will I be more careful? Well certainly at roundabouts, but I don't think that I'm a careless rider or I'd have had more problems in 6 years.

So in the words of the Hill Street Blues desk sergeant, "Let's be careful out there"

thanks to the original owners of the pictures and videos used here.