Traffic in Jakarta

Jakarta is amazing. Three days in, and we're still getting eyeball exhaustion from trying to take in even a portion of what is happening in this quaint little burg of 20 million.

We will post a proper entry on the experience of working at the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, but for now I will just say that it has been warm, fascinating, educational, sobering productive and fun. Check tomorrow's Indonesian newspapers for our names! (more to come on that)

The only thing I want to broach is the experience of riding around in Jakarta. It's kind of like a two dimensional Star Wars space battle scene. There are dozens of varieties of modes of transport here, from buses through taxis through bajajs (think motorized covered wheelbarrow) through motorbikes through rickshaws. And they all move in accordance less with traffic laws and lane markings but more with the unspoken law of swarm theory - like in Planet Earth where a dense ball of fish all dart in and out but still move in the same direction together. Distances between vehicles and pedestrians that would make a midwestern driver blow a gasket are the norm, and once I found myself staring out the window of a taxi at a man's hand on the handle of a motorbike, so close that I could see the individual hairs on his knuckles.

So quickly I've gone from clenching every muscle and preparing for impact to enjoying the physical ballet that is Jakarta traffic. This should be in the guidebooks as the number one attraction in town.

As for pictures, I will provide them at a later date, and apologize for the lack of visual proof of all that we write so far. The connection speed here is difficult.