This footpath's made for ............ parking

In some places footpaths (also known as sidewalks after all) are for walking. Not in Indonesia though. There might have been some sort of intention like this when they were constructed. But in real life, footpaths are for running your food stall or some other business. Pedestrians can just fight it out on the roadway with all the cars, trucks, and motorbikes.

I watched one entrepreneur run his car parking business on a busy road in Jakarta's congested Kota district. Not on the road of course, but on the footpath. The grey Daihatsu in the middle of the top picture has been reversed painstakingly against the traffic, to where the parking wallah wants him. He's told to swing out to the right, regardless of the cars trying to come past him.



A steady stream of motorbikes hurtle through on both sides, completely ignoring the instructions of car park wallah, who's frantically blowing his whistle to no avail.

 Positioned all wrong. Better go forward again.


Wait for a gap. Back you go again. Hurry! Lots more whistles. Some rocks are positioned to help mount the curb. Oh dear, missed them. Scrape the bottom as we mount the footpath.

No wonder Jakarta's traffic is a total mess.

White knuckle travel

At first glance this could be a picture of fairly orderly traffic. Two cars on the left, and a bus and a truck on the other side of the road, going the other way.

Alas no. This is India. It's actually a picture of us, and alongside us the truck which has just overtaken us. Coming the other way are a bus and a car, side by side. All four vehicles are about to come together in an almighty head-on crash!

At the last moment the truck swerves back to the left, and the oncoming car sees the light and ducks back in behind the bus. Crisis averted once more!

This sort of thing happens every minute or two on every drive on every Indian road! On this occasion it was made worse by the road being the nine-hairpin-bend stretch of road which drops 700m from the Western Ghats to the Malabar Coast. Wherever you are though, the best strategy is to just not look out the front. Let the driver do the driving (and the honking of the horn every few seconds). All you can do is quietly ponder your funeral arrangements.

The accident rate is indeed high. But it can't be as high as we'd expect it to be. We're still alive after all. The nominal road rules may be totally irrelevant, but there are conventions and patterns which presumably must be followed, about who wins and who loses the constant games of chicken.

Within the cities it's all played out at a slower pace, because there's traffic gridlock most of the time! Here are some views out the front in Bangalore, Trivandrum, and Nagercoil.