“…whoso travels in Java for the first time, writes to his family that he has been in very dangerous situations. But whoso lives there, just laughs about that fear.”
Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trade Company, Multatuli, 1860
At the Fulbright conference in Jakarta a couple of weeks ago, I had several great conversations with young Indonesians heading off to various universities in the United States to pursue a Masters or PhD degree. They were excited, animated, overwhelmed by the pending adventure, and very talkative. One of my favorite conversations was with a young civil engineer from the northern part of the island of Sulawesi, who was headed to the University of Maryland to study traffic engineering.
He had practical reasons for it, of course (“I’m on the faculty of civil engineering, and I teach traffic engineering”) but when I pressed him on it, he said that he was interested in traffic engineering because it was, as he put it, much more “dynamic” than civil engineering. “If we need to build a bridge in Sulawesi,” he said, “we could get help from a civil engineer from the United States who could come over here and build a bridge. It’s the same to build a bridge there as in the United States, and he wouldn’t have to have any knowledge of the culture or geography to build a good bridge. But to do traffic engineering, a person has to be an engineer, but he also has to understand culture, and history, and the geography. You have to understand the place, or you won’t build traffic systems that will work in that context.”
He described a new bus system in the city of Manado on Sulawesi, one that had fixed bus stops on the principal that it would work faster because it would only stop at designated places. The problem, however, was that people in Manado didn’t want to walk to a bus stop. They wanted to do what everyone else in Indonesia does, which is walk to a corner, or in front of their house, or wherever they are, and wave for the bus to stop. So the new system, incredibly efficient, much faster, probably safer and probably better buses, had no riders, because no one wanted to walk to the bus stop. (Of course, a very common response to that here would be a precursor of “American indignant” – a kind of Frederick Taylor on holiday “American efficient”: “We need to train these people to do that more efficient thing because that is the smarter way to do it, and if they understand why it is smarter, they will start walking to the buses.” One time in Nepal I watched an American doctor become very frustrated, pointing his arms in the air and shouting, because the porters carrying the boxes of expensive medical equipment failed to understand the meaning of the words “This way up” with a large arrow pointing, at that moment, downward. Not efficient, which begets the American indignant.)
It was a great conversation because it highlighted the limitations of expert knowledge, limitations which are visibly present in Javanese cities like Jakarta and Semarang and Surabaya, where one recoils in horror at the odor and filth of the canals the Dutch installed to make the place feel more like Amsterdam, the stagnant brown tropical water a perfect incubator for all sorts of malicious microbes and insects. It’s also the case that traffic engineers should have a sustainable career path here, where 130 million people, in the case of Java, zip around the highways on every form of possible transportation (on major national highways, one will have, within sight at all times: bicycles, motorcycles, becaks [bicycle taxis], dokars [horse-drawn carriages], cars, small buses, slightly larger buses, giant buses, trucks of all sizes, pedestrians, and chickens.)
Talking to him made me understand one of the sensations I’ve had here in the last several months, as I’ve graduated from riding my bike to driving a motorcycle and finally to tooling around Java behind the wheel of a rented car (something I promised myself I would not do before I arrived here): as I have come to understand Javanese traffic, come to feel not just comfortable but at home in its chaos and swirling majesty, I have felt like I understood this place better. It sounds trivial, but as Multatuli wrote 150 years, about carriage travel in Java, when you first hit the highways here, there appears to be no logic, no sense, no pattern, just insanity, speed, and impending death, and then you just laugh about it. Several times on the road trip I took with Michael, we just began laughing spontaneously at the way that motorcycle weaved its way through already fast moving traffic, or whatever version of craziness we saw. There is no road rage here, no one yelling at you or flipping you off when you dart into traffic to merge in a lane where there is really no space for merging - they are expecting you. Courtesy is not an issue here – it is impossible to imagine a condition in which a slow-moving truck would pull over to let traffic pass – but it doesn’t matter because rudeness is not an issue either. When you pass, and try to merge, cars let you in. No one ever tries to block you out, and the honks on the road are polite announcements of the presence of something near you: “I’m over here.” The one rule of Javanese traffic appears to be: except at a traffic light, never ever stop. It’s a microcosm (with nothing micro about it, of course) of the wonder of this place, where the patterns of daily life, the way things happen, the energy and the excitement, require time to see, require that you let go of the American efficient that even I (recently voted the world’s most inefficient person, by a panel of me) found marking my cultural heritage when I arrived.
Now I just want to go drive around the place, and I hope, on one of my return visits, to do a trans-Java road trip, two weeks from tip to tip, with whomever needs a sustained adrenaline rush.
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