Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Jakarta was insane. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, and far more fucked up than I could have possibly foreseen.

Seriously though. Here’s a list of thing I saw or witnessed in approximately the correct order:

• The airport itself was nice, fairly clean and stunk like powerful cigarettes everywhere.
• The roads from the airport to Jakarta were about 3 inches of water away from being flooded. Apparently we were extremely lucky, since usually the roads are flooded. When that happens, military ATVs are sent on routes between the city and the airport ferrying stranded passengers.
• Once you hit the city, you start noticing that the average income is extremely low. A sizable portion of the houses are collapsed, although that doesn’t deter anyone from living in them. All the roofs have holes and pieces missing, and so on. The freeway is built at least 20 feet above these houses, and it feels like its purpose is to shield people from seeing them.
• People burn garbage in their yard. Any type of garbage. All the time. Smoke trails come from every direction you can see, and the air is well, pungent with the smell.
• Speaking of garbage - it’s everywhere. There are piles of garbage in every nook and cranny that can hold it. Piled really high too, sometimes over ten feet tall. Usually nestled around the piles are homes, as well as stalls selling food.
• The streets. Wow, where to start. OK - there are lines for lane designation, but no one cares. On two lane streets there are three or four lanes of actual vehicles with hardly anybody bothering to use signals. And major roads are shown as being one way, but vehicles occasionally come at you from the wrong direction.
• You can probably see in the photo that people are literally hanging out of the buses. That’s no big deal, and it happens in a lot of countries (though this is the first time I’ve seen it).
• There’s certain roads reserved for vehicles with 3 or more people (like carpool lanes). So at locations where these roads begin - and that’s usually in the middle of nowhere, halfway to the airport - clusters of kids hang around, and for about 50 U.S. cents they’ll jump in your car so you meet the person quota.
• This is awesome: When big trucks are driving down the road, people run alongside them with a tube and a gascan, and steal their fucking fuel. While it’s moving. I saw almost crapped my pants when I saw this happen and realized what the guy was doing.
• There’s two classes of people there with absolutely no gradient. You’re either really poor, or massively rich. The wealthy families live in big, gated communities with armed guards.
• It’s dangerous being a foreigner there. Truly dangerous. Most cars have dark tinted glass to minimize the chance of anything bad happening to the passengers. In face, a guy named Rupert wrote on my entry the other day saying that, “there are plenty of instances where people pull up on a motorbike, smash the window with a gun and relieve you of your phone etc“. He’s right; that shit does happen there.
• Most people don’t have phone lines, nobody has the Internet at home. But pretty much everybody has cellular phones.

So yeah, it’s another world. Chances are that I’ll go back, but I’m not tingling with the desire to do so. And I’m not embellishing in the information here - Chris, my coworker who accompanied me, will probably read this and kick my ass if I bullshit about his homeland.

The best image I could get: