No Fury Like A City Scorned

It's midnight on Friday night. I'm in the back seat of a police car as it tears through the streets with its siren blaring. And I wonder silently whether a city can have vengeful feelings.

It had been raining all through Thursday night and Friday morning. I had left my hotel at 1130am with a couple of colleagues. We'd been advised to leave early so we could catch our afternoon flight, which was scheduled for 230 in the afternoon. At 130pm we were still in the taxi. I could see cars and buses and trucks stacked bumper-to-bumper for about a kilometer ahead of us, beyond which the road curved out of sight. My driver offered his estimate of how much longer it might take to reach our destination: "Maybe one hour, maybe two hour, maybe three hour, maybe four hour." We gathered that he wasn't really sure.

At 230 in the afternoon we were still in the taxi. The driver was slowly unfolding his vocabulary. He waved vaguely at the immobile traffic and announced we had a problem. "Problem", he said, "problem problem." Apparently there was a problem. Apparently we were too daft to know it without the benefit of his keen insight into gridlock in Jakarta.

By this time it was obvious that we were in the sort of mess that invariably makes it to CNN. About twenty minutes into the world news report they have a slot for third world disasters and other cock-ups in the developing world. This would fit in very nicely as either "Creaking infrastructure collapses at first sign of strain" or "Global warming causes freak weather - tens of thousands stranded in floods." It was vaguely comforting to know we were in the middle of a bona fide global news event.

Over the next five hours we inched our way through about two kilometers. I'm not kidding - I saw the road markers and counted off the distance we had covered. By this time we'd given up on making it to the airport in time to catch any flight that night and decided to try again the next day. As soon as we decided to turn back to the hotel, we found ourselves trapped on an exit ramp where traffic had come to an even more complete standstill.

Awe-struck at the realization that there was a level of immobility beyond what we'd already experienced, I slowly started to notice the people around me. They were all supremely calm. Not in a resigned way - everywhere I looked I saw pleasant, cheerful faces. No one was shouting or even getting mildly irritable. People casually got out of their cars or trucks, exchanged a word with those around them, smoked a cigarette, went for a little stroll among the inert vehicles, or just sat back calmly and waited.

Incredible as it seems, being in that traffic jam was a deeply relaxing experience.

Which lasted another two hours.

By this time I was convinced that the city was somehow sentient and had taken deep offence to my last post in which I'd whinged at traffic in jakarta. "You think you've seen traffic?", I imagined it fuming, "I'll show you traffic that will bring you to your knees. I'll show you gridlock that will make your soul cry out in despair. You want traffic? I'll give you traffic!"

(I think by this time I was mildly delirious. I don't ordinarily have morbid fantasies of animated metropolises plotting vengeance against mankind.)

Then our taxi broke down. With sickening inevitability our driver explained the situation. "Problem", he announced. Then he brightened up as he remembered another word he knew. With doubled eloquence he went on to share his thoughts and feelings: "Problem. Stress." In hindsight he looked much more relaxed than he sounded. Perhaps it was because by that time he had been running his meter for nearly ten hours.

Luckily our local office had swung into action and managed to organize a police car to try and extricate us. At first I felt a little guilty that these officers of the law had been pulled away from their crime-fighting duties to aid a bunch of foreigners stuck in traffic. But then I realized that any would-be criminals were pretty much stranded in their getaway cars, much like us. The cops could safely find us, extricate us, bring us back to our hotel, watch a movie, spend a couple of hours hitting golf balls, read a book, have breakfast, go back to the scene of the crime, and still find the bad guys smoking cigarettes patiently while they waited for the flood waters to subside and the traffic to dissolve.

That made me feel much better. That, and the prospect of finally being able to go to the washroom.

The only problem was that the cops could not get to us because ... they were stuck in the traffic! After another hour of practicing breathing exercises we were lucky enough to encounter a good samaritan who managed to find a way to get us to where the cops were stranded. Then we got into their car and after another hour we finally managed to extricate ourselves from where we were trapped and turn around to go back to the city.

Then, under a screaming police siren, we zipped through the streets to return where we'd set out from. After thirteen hours.

The next day we made it to the airport in two hours.

And just to set the record straight, Jakarta is a lovely city. The traffic really isn't so bad at all.