Motorcycle Madness

I love driving. I don't know what it is, but I whole-heartedly enjoy the activity. Destination is secondary if I am behind the wheel. As a kid, I must have regularly complained about mowing the lawn, but when I look back at all my memories of actually sitting on the riding mower, I don't think I have a single negative one in store. I used to humor myself by trying to mow soccer-field-like stripes in the front lawn; I had strategies to trim our amorphously shaped yard in a path that was as symmetrical as possible, even though it undoubtedly took longer; I was thrilled to mow a walkway in our overgrown field one summer when many relatives planned to visit us; it killed me to share the mower with my cousin when it came time to cut down the cornstalks in my grandfather's garden; I begged incessantly for at least a couple years to have a go-cart. And when I was finally given a golf cart, it took only months for it to be driven to an anticlimactic death of smelly electrical smoke.

It's times like yesterday when individual qualities such as this, which have been engrained and nurtured for years, come in markedly handy. My motorcycle trip to Lake Toba, which started only on Monday and ended promptly on Tuesday consisted of over 12 hours of driving. It was supposedly a 4 hour trip in either direction, but as I've discussed before, estimates of time, distance, and speed are seldom accurate here. Indonesian people will consistently underestimate distance and time, but they will always exaggerate speed. This undoubtedly means that the more questions you ask about any particular destination (concerning the three variables mentioned above), the more your travel plans will differ from the reality of your actual trip.

For example, I'd like to share an excerpt from the pre-travel-coordination conversation I had with my friend Chris the night before we left for Lake Toba. Distances have already been converted to miles for your convenience.

“So, how far would you say we're going to be riding tomorrow?”
“It's right around 60 miles”
“Great, how long do you think that will take?”
“It's usually around five hours, but if we tried to average 60 miles per hour, we could easily do it in four.”
“I'm sorry, could you repeat that?”
“Yeah, if we average 60 miles per hour, then we could make the trip in four hours.”
“...and how far did you say it was again?”
“60 miles”
“So... it's going to take four hours to get there?”
“Sure, but only if we average 60 miles per hour”
“Alrighty then.”

You can see the logic just completely break down right in front of you if you ask too many questions, and I honestly don't know why I still bother. First of all, I'd like to note that we likely traveled over 100 miles in each direction. And secondly, there's no possible way anyone could average 60 miles per hour riding on mo-peds in Indonesian traffic. I've never even gotten my mo-ped up to 50 miles per hour going down hill, and if I could, I wouldn't have any desire to do so. To make a lazy comparison, driving in Indonesian is like a constant game of Frogger – a game of Frogger in which the roles are reversed, and instead of a frog trying to avoid many cars, it's a motorcycle trying to avoid an amalgam of other motorcycles and a plethora of other randomly shifting objects. There are four chief differences, though, that add four new dimensions to the game. The first is that driving here is, in fact, not a game at all, which tends to amplify the gravity of the situation. The second is that actual gravity does, indeed, play a role. Helmets are flying off people's heads, shoes are coming off people's feet, and unsecured furniture is falling off people's trucks. Next is that, contrary to frogger where individual lines of traffic move at constant speeds, people in Indonesia are always accelerating, decelerating, and switching lanes altogether, at totally unpredictable times. And hey, what am I saying? There never really were lanes here to begin with. And lastly, in Frogger, you only have to worry about cars moving perpendicular to your path. In Indonesian traffic, you must avoid drivers who commonly head the wrong way down one-way streets, pedestrians crossing at inopportune times, carrying gigantic, vision-obstructing boxes of tofu, and let's not forget stray farm animals of all sizes, running in all directions.

I can't imagine how naturally adept at games like Need for Speed Indonesian children must be. When driving here, my awareness peaks, and I feel like I've inherited some sort of Spiderman-like super power, where I know exactly what's happening behind me as I follow multiple other simultaneous events in front and on either side of my motorcycle. I've always been one to analyze my soccer game, and even at age 23 and not playing on a team, I still can't help but do it. The last few times I've played pick-up games in Medan, in some aspects, I've been playing better than ever before. This made no sense to me until I started writing this entry, but I'm now pretty sure that even though I hardly played in Pati after Christmas, and though I didn't play when I went home this past summer, I have had numerous grueling practice sessions on Indonesian streets. It's not that I'm running faster or doing any impressive ticks, but my concentration on the ball and on my teammates has jumped to a whole new level over the past six months. I'm sending one-touch passes to people making runs behind me that I would have never been able to do a year a ago.

Amidst all the confusion on the roads here, there is one thing you can always count on though, which adds an undeniable element of safety that does not exist on American streets. You can always take for granted that no other drivers are taking anything for granted. People drive more slowly; they are constantly scanning their surroundings (because they absolutely have to), and road-rage just isn't a factor because, guess what, shit happens, and it happens a lot on Indonesian streets; people just don't get angry about it. The phenomenon of over-correcting because you made a mistake and became panicked doesn't really exist here either. Indonesian drivers cannot afford to drift into a state of complacency and controlled cruise, where being startled is even an option. You can't do anything resembling “cruising” in Indonesia. Truth be told, you're sort of always panicking on the roads here, and while that may seem super dangerous on the surface, I think it actually falls into the category of, “if you emphasize everything, then you emphasize nothing.” What I mean to say by that is if you're always in a state of panic, then after a while, panicking ends up not being so bad.

So even in Indonesia, I still love driving, and again, that served me incredibly well last night when I found my way home against all odds. Chris, who I knew was going to be a fast driver from his personality, ended up totally ditching me only an hour into our drive home from Lake Toba. It was dark and rainy, and I simply wasn't going to step out of my comfort zone to try to keep up with him. There are certain things I am just not willing to do. One of those things happens to be driving entirely too fast in adverse conditions, risking the remaining years of my life, in order to save an hour. So, not paying enough attention, Chris kept the pedal to the medal, and he lost me. When I talked to him later, I found that he had made multiple stops to wait and watch for me, but since it was at night (cloudy and rainy), the only thing that was clear was that I did not see him. It would have been so convenient if we could have just called each other and figured out our respective locations. However, last night happened to be the year's biggest night of celebration in the whole country, the last night of Ramadan. And as to cater to nostalgic families, Telkomsel deemed it appropriate to make all calls free. Consequently, the air-space was completely clogged, and you couldn't make a call if your life depended on it. And so, Telkomsel entered my life in yet another area to inconvenience me again.

The magnitude of this particular holiday in Indonesia is far beyond Christmas Day in the U.S.; it's like comparing President's Day to Easter. The Christmas season as a whole in the U.S., however, is much more of an affair than the Ramadan season in Indonesia. We have decorations that we keep up for over a month; there are tons of Christmas songs and movies, and we even have a season change that adds the image of “a white Christmas.” There's virtually nothing like that in Indonesia. However (and this is a big however), the last night of fasting is the most impressive collective societal event I've ever conceived of, and no other culture on earth has a comparable holiday, even in other Muslim countries. Last year, locked away in the confines of an Islamic boarding school in a small village, I couldn't really appreciate it. This year however, I found myself driving alone, through villages and cities, at prime time (6 pm – 12 am), through some the most intense insanity I'd ever experienced.

Indonesians are very proud of their unique holiday, Lebaran, which marks the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Idul Fitri. It's a nation-wide migration, where nearly every person in the country leaves their home. Traditionally, you go back to your childhood town or village, where your parents are from, but families generally take turns visiting a different prominent family member each year. It transcends religion, so even Christians join in on the madness. I've been told that nearly 80% of the residents of Jakarta's metropolitan area (that's over 16 million people, but don't quote me on that because I just talked about how people exaggerate) leave the city to head home. It's the only time of year when you can drive freely on Jakarta's infamously crammed streets, and every plane and train ticket in the country is booked weeks in advance, and of course, travel agencies jack prices 3-fold. Frankly, it's extremely difficult to find a single person who's not going at least somewhere for Lebaran, even 15 minutes away. Indonesians love to get together to hang out, and no other country can boast a nation-wide migration even remotely close to the world's 4th most populated country.

On any saturday night, at any given city center in Indonesia, you'll find something comparable to the proportions of an annual county fair in America. Tents are set up; people sell produce and food from carts; stands are available where you can buy music and DVDs, and kids have every kind of entertainment they could ask for. So, to put this terms we can all hopefully understand, my journey home last night, during the biggest holiday of the year, was like driving through miles and miles on end of Thunder over Louisville, the Kentucky Derby, or within a half-mile radius of the racetrack parking lot directly after the checkered flag of the Indianapolis 500. Fireworks started as soon as the sun went down yesterday and hadn't stopped by the time I got back to Medan at midnight. Every mosque in the area was sounding it's call to prayer. Trucks everywhere were decorated like floats in a parade with people playing music in their beds. Countless gangs of motorcycles road together, revving their engines in synchronized rhythms. Policemen and other security were directing traffic at every stoplight. Makeshift stands, selling fried goodies lined the streets. Kid's carnival games were at every big intersection, and probably 90% of the population was outside. I've always heard people talk about Lebaran and how many people go out at night to celebrate it, but last year, circumstances prevented me from seeing what really goes on. This year, circumstances allowed me to see Lebaran from farm to village to the 3rd largest city in the country.

All this was admittedly quite nerve-wracking for me, considering that I had no clue where I was (except that the road signs kept saying “to Medan”) and that it was pouring rain the whole time. It is currently the most intense part of the wet season in North Sumatra, and at one point around 10 pm I was riding through six inches of water with a legion of other motorcycles. Despite the chaos though, from the moment I lost sight of Chris, I had already decided that I wasn't going to be angry with him. I know Indonesian people well, and I was positive that the extent to which he was going to be worrying about me, once he realized that he had lost me at night, in a monsoon, hours before arriving in Medan, on the last night of Ramadan, was going to far and away surpass whatever combination of emotions I could possibly be feeling about the situation. I also knew that if he had started to make calls to people at my school about his losing me, then they were going to be so angry with him, that there was no need for me to add any more negative feelings to the equation. In fact, I was hoping in my heart of hearts that he had not already begun to make calls (that is if he could have gotten through to anyone in the first place).

The fact of the matter is that I would have never agreed to go on an epic motorcycle journey if I wasn't already 100% confident that I could have done it by myself. I know how to handle myself here, and I know how to talk to strangers. After more than a year of constantly traveling in this country, I'm also much better equipped to deal with unpredictable circumstances in unfamiliar environments. If something to the degree of losing my only guide in the middle of nowhere had not happened on this trip, truthfully I would have pretty surprised. I may not willingly put myself in positions of needless risk, such as driving like the MotoGP champion on pothole-laden roads; on the other hand, I have come to the point where I seek adventure at virtually every opportunity.

Once I arrived in Medan, I went straight to Chris's house, and despite his having stopped to looked for me (as well as having asked locals if they'd seen a white guy wearing a silver poncho) at every intersection in each subsequent city before Medan, he still managed to get back before me. Truth be told, not too long after I lost sight of him, I decided that since I wasn't going to be mad at him, I would make up for those feelings in another way and just relish in the fact that he should have been more responsible and that he was certainly going to be feeling intense sensations of guilt. Accordingly, I slowed down, pulled over, got my iPod out of my bag, safely secured it under my rain jacket, and fed the headphones into my helmet. I reduced my pace to a speed that would ensure my utmost safety, and I drove happily in the rain for hours, listening to my favorite music, through the craziest bedlam Indonesia has to offer. I then cruelly enjoyed the desperate expression on his face when he burst through his front door to meet the motorcycle pulling into his driveway at 12 am.

Did I mention that Lake Toba happens to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth? Well, it is.