Ring Road

            There’s a new highway almost finished on the north end of Salatiga, a ring road that will enable the Semarang – Solo traffic to bypass Salatiga on a four lane highway. This should be a great thing for Salatiga traffic, because the road through town now is hilariously busy often with lines of buses and trucks at top speeds, something you notice when your main method of moving about is on foot, bicycle, or motorcycle. Those buses are big, and they’re all about the destination, not the journey.

            It passes fairly close to our house, and it’s been a great place to go for a bike ride. I went there with Graham on Sunday afternoon so he could so some extended skating on the new roller skates he got for his birthday, and I followed him around on my bicycle while he wore himself out.  The closer the road has gotten to completion, the more it has become a sort of city park, so that when you go there, you see all sorts of people, picnicking on the side of highway, young men lining up their motorcycles for spirited races on the straightaways, couples meandering along the fresh white stripes going down the road. All of this happens in spite of the busy road work going on, the buckets of burning tar, the men painting the curbs, the steamrollers and the back-hoes – you just go around them, whatever form of transport you use. It’s already smooth enough for local drivers to use it as a convenient bypass – it’s a city park with a lot of fast moving hazards transversing it, in other words.

By any standards, it’s a nice road, smooth, wide, free of obstacles and cross traffic, for the most part (though it will, I suspect, be a bear to cross when it opens), which means that by Javanese standards it’s something of a miracle. Travel in this country is amazing. We’re 37 kilometers from Semarang, but if you can get there in an hour you’re lucky. If you happen to travel there or back at any of the times when the shifts are out in the fabric factories (read: sweatshops) in Undangan, there’s not much to do but just watch as the young women crowd onto bus after bus, or stand waiting on the corner in large groups. Looking at the traffic from a bus, or as a new arrival, it’s easy to feel like there’s no logic to it, just a mass of undisciplined traffic, but now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle in this traffic (which still doesn’t count as fun, for the most part, except that it kind of is [unless I am riding with Laura on the back, who actively comments on the relentless hazards in utterances that usually take the form of various vowel sounds] – where was I? Oh…), now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle I get the logic of the roads, the horns typically a polite (sometimes very loud polite) signal that there is car or a motorcycle in a space you look like you might want to occupy but should not. There are motorcycles weaving everywhere, darting between buses and cars and trucks and other motorcycles. It’s mostly a two lane highway between here and Semarang, but with anywhere from 4-6 lanes of traffic.

So the ring road feels like something of a luxury, an extravagance, an enormously appealing place to go where you can move at top speed on whatever vehicle you are riding (lovely, for example, on the ride down a very long steep hill on a bicycle) because you never really move that fast in traffic here. It’s strange to bond with the community on the brand new ring road, but for the weeks that remain before it gets hit by actual traffic, it’s a gathering place, and an oddly pleasant way to spend an afternoon, with traffic that is all about the journey for the moment, back and forth, with no place to go.