TRAVELS WITH MY TEXT BOOKS 4

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If you thought the traffic in Britain was bad, you should hear what Kate Ross has to put up with in Jakarta......

My youngest class is as naughty as ever. Little Miss Tantrum made a reappearance after several weeks of absence, but her presence was short-lived. The tantrum began approximately thirty seconds after her mother had disappeared from view and I can safely say she definitely won't be back. Max the puppet has lost his second eye in a scuffle between two girls who both wanted to be in charge of him. He is not making a reappearance in the classroom, at least not until he undergoes surgery.

Aside from this, work has been fairly mellow. I have taught most of my classes for several months now, some since I first arrived, and have eased into that comfortable stage where I know what games they like, they can predict when I am about to explain ten exceptions to the grammatical rule they have just grasped, and they have got over their initial shyness so completely that I can't believe they were ever afraid of talking in the first place.

It is outside of the classroom where most of my news has come from in the past few weeks. Two of my friends recently had a beautiful baby girl. Twenty of us headed to the hospital, where I'm sure in any Western country, eighteen would have been evicted immediately by a bustling nurse. However, since our crowd was made up of ten bule (white foreigners), we were considered a novelty and allowed to clog up the hallways for most of the day.

When I haven't been cooing over babies I've noticed that my neighbourhood is currently playing host to a convoy of bencong (ladyboys). The ringleader stands outside the local cafés and warung (street stalls) with a tambourine, singing and dancing provocatively while her army looks on admiringly. The idea, of course, is that you pay them to leave you alone with your chicken saté and freshly squeezed orange juice. The locals pay her, not because they want her to disappear, but because they find the whole thing absolutely hilarious.

This reaction is very typical of my neighbourhood, which is extremely close knit. When I first told people I was moving to Indonesia, their immediate concern was my safety. Let me stress here something I have said hundreds of times, Indonesians are possibly the friendliest people I have ever met on my travels. It is not possible to walk for two minutes without someone saying hello or asking where I'm going. I take it as a personal insult if I make it to the internet café without so much as a 'hello mister' and have never felt my safety was at risk. This is, of course, until I step into a taxi.

A friend of mine recently went back to England for a three week holiday. Once we had got past the bare essentials of 'what did you eat?' and 'was it cold?' talk quickly turned to the rules of the road. In the UK people follow the rules of the road and my friend, who has lived in Jakarta for several years now, found it very challenging to adjust.

It is difficult to describe just how reckless drivers in Jakarta are. The needle on the speed dial is always hanging just a little too far to the right, rarely dropping below 120km/hr. There is no speed definition between lanes and the cars weave and loop in a frenzy, overtaking and cutting in while you sit in the back of the taxi, pressed to the seat in paralysed fear, holding your breath. The luxury of seatbelts is a rare bonus and such a novelty you feel you should take this taxi driver's number. Where there are two marked lanes, three cars will fill them; where they are three, there is certainly enough room for five. And if you are foolish enough to tell your taxi driver that you are in a hurry and there is yet another traffic jam, it's fairly likely you'll find yourself speeding up the hard shoulder. These traffic jams always seem to quadruple in size whenever it rains; it is almost as if Indonesians in Jakarta look outside and think 'it's raining, I have to get into a car straight away.'

Adding to this weaving game in a tropical downpour are the motorbikes. My personal favourites are the ones where an entire family is crammed on. Father is at the front, either cradling a baby or balancing a small child between his knees. Mother is at the back, second baby optional. And sandwiched between them are two older children, sitting side-saddle. None of them have helmets, but this does not stop their determination to drive as fast as possible and to squeeze into any miniscule gap that appears.

In addition to seeing exactly how many people it is possible to fit on one motorbike, I began seeking out the most unusual belonging I could see loaded onto a motorbike. It began small - perhaps a large watermelon. And then it crept up to a half metre diameter of electrical wiring, a rug, an entire candyfloss stall, and one man skilfully balancing at least fifty plastic household items. Finally, it went all out with two pigs and four chickens, and concluded with two men sitting either side of a window and door. Luckily, these people are not usually found in the heart of Jakarta's traffic and are mostly speeding through the suburbs or villages. I would not want to experience a head on collision between a taxi and a door. But these incidences are just a few of the amazing little quirks that Indonesia is composed of and make my experience here just that little bit more unique.

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