The Almighty Aardvark said:
What's the most dangerous situation you've been in, and where?
Ah I forgot your second, very interesting question...
I think the winner there would be Jakarta just last new years, and one of the most life-affirming but scary incidents I have yet enjoyed. I had said goodbye to my fellow revelers someone around 2am, and went looking for a taxi home. Little did I realize that unlike in China most of the dependable taxi companies let their drivers take the night off on NYE[footnote] When traveling to south east Asian countries it's a good idea to learn which cab company is favored by expats. Typically the good ones use meters which can fairly measure distance and charge accordingly - disreputable companies get their drivers to barter the fee before the ride with tourists, screwing them with bullshit fees and distances. Note, don't bother doing this in Kuala Lumpur: they're all corrupt money grubbers to a man - no reliable company. [/footnote] . I can't really overstate how big and under policed and, well, scary Jakarta is for an expat at 2am. Most expats would tell you that every local is a murderer at that hour and you're in serious trouble, and to be sure I was a bit spooked.
I needn't have been. Once again the colonialist conceit[footnote] The smug certainty that anyone who doesn't speak English is a shifty little bugger, low on education and just looking for a chance to grab your purse. This is most distressingly employed by expat women who just sit around in cafes in groups cracking jokes about the waiter's manners and tossing out throwaway comments of ethnic intolerance while they tell their maids how to knee-bunk their crying expat babies [/footnote] was disproved. I wandered down the street until I stumbled upon a group of guards standing outside the gate to a big office building. This is a common sight in Jakarta, and I tried to be cheerful: "salemat malan," I said in shitty Indonesian what was probably the wrong time of day-based greeting, "blue bird?" I was asking them where I could find the reputable taxi company. "No blue bird. No blue bird." They said, smiling broadly and waving their arms laterally in front of their waist in a crossed cutting motion, the universal symbol of "no dice". " really? Hrmm, crap! Ha ha" i made a face of annoyance and invited them to laugh at/with me, which they did.
Some of them (there are about six) started trying to flag down taxis, and I would ask the drivers: "meter?" And they would either take the time to tell me "no meter" or just accelerate away. After a while I started thinking I could just walk home, that the trip was only a couple of kilometers. This, incidentally, would have featured a stretch through a street that was infested with local criminals who once massacred Chinese-Indonesians and who now manage motorbike[footnote] more motorbikes than people in Jakarta[/footnote] parking pens. I didn't really realize this and, searching for words that are likely to be the same in both languages (something I'm good at) I started by pointing with my arms in what I thought was the right direction and asking "setiyabudi?" (the suburb name) They said "no! Ha-ha" and pointed in the opposite direction! At this point I was still infected with the colonialist mistrust and I was wondering if they were fucking with me. After dithering for a few minutes waiting for a blue bird taxi I eventually told them: "I'll walk *finger mime walking*," and, needing a map: "GPS?" Progress! One of them had a GPS on his phone, but it lacked the ping that told you where you were. I used inflections and my extremely limited vocabulary to ask where my home was, where the bar i had been in was, and to try and figure out which direction I should be going in. It was not easy, this city has a really confusing layout and is, frankly, enormous. I felt like I was in blade runner or something.
Ultimately these happy guards talked amongst themselves until one of them piped up in a clear, decisive voice: "setiyabudi! Ojak?" Ojak! One of those precious few words I know called out to me like a rising sun: ojak! Motorbike! Scooter! The guards were asking if I wanted to be driven home on the back of a motorbike! Relief flooded me, excitement flooded me, fear flooded me (Indonesians thread their ojaks through traffic like salmon going down rapids) and I said "ojak! Ojak!... OK! Hahaha" we all chuckled and I, tears in my eyes, took the helmet offered ("obviously a token piece of equipment" I thought), shook hands with everyone, positively puked out "teri mah kasi" and "ma kasi" ("thank you " and "thanks" respectively) and climbed on the back of my heroes' bike.
After I had been standing and freaking out for half an hour the shot away from the curve and smooth, gritty acceleration of the scooter was exhilarating and somehow felt like entering a new dimension, like putting in a cheat code. I held on to the shoulders of my driver for dear life and tried my best - I'd never really done it before - to lean into his hectic turns. My thighs and knees were gripping the bike so tight my ass went numb, and we rocketed through streets, usually extremely packed but at 3am all but empty.
We didn't go the way I expected, instead he seemed to circle around through a hilly, almost leafy neighborhood that I had no idea existed in what was a seriously sprawling mess of a city. I was worried that he was taking me to my bloody death for about five interminable minutes until, relief of all reliefs, I saw the twin towers of my parents' apartment building towering out of the low lying residential suburb it centered some kilometers away. We had gone through a huge swoop around the back, and I giddily took over navigation over the last kilometer or so through the maze of suburban streets, directing him by sticking my arm out past his helmet and jabbing my hand in one direction or another.
The evening drama was far from over, however! When we were just a few hundred meters short of the gate we hit a pot hole and my fat ass, relatively over muscled, beef hormone supercharged western frame snapped something in his rear wheel. Desperately he crawled the last stretch to the front gate and, at last!, I was home.
I asked him how much his wheel would cost to fix at the nearby rickshaw-housed bike repair shop, he said it would cost fifty thousand. I gave him two hundred thousand, hugged him, said thank you another seven times and, grinning and supercharged with goodwill to my fellow man, started walking to my building. The evening was not quite over however. I was walking around the huge central swimming pool to the apartment complex and spun on my heel to give two local janitors a graceful and sincere "happy new year" in Indonesian, when a slippery mat gave way beneath me and I sunk, slow motion and ass first, into a pool side mini canal, a decorative feature full of plants. It took about five seconds for me to submerge my ass a good 30cm into the water before the two janitors rushed over, grabbed me by the arms and hauled me out.
Humiliated, dripping, stinky and grateful, I said one more happy new year and trudged off to the elevator, topless and.. Absolutely cackling at what a clumsy, bumbling, unorganized boofhead I had been. Also I was marveling at how fantastic every last Indonesian I had met that evening had been.
I was in real danger there, but I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the greatest experiences I've had in years. I wrote all this on my mobile, sorry if it is a bit type-oh ridden.
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