This morning, as usual, I picked up a friend and whisked us to the office on my dear motorcycle. I wasn’t racing, but I wasn’t a snail either. We got through traffic just fine and arrived at the final U-turn, about 300 meters away from our final destination. I pressed on the brakes and we slowed down to an almost complete stop. I saw that the oncoming traffic was still about half a kilometer away and I decided I could make the turn. So I did.
But I was wrong.
Some guy on an old rusty motorcycle yelled at me for making a near-miss. My heart must’ve skipped a beat, because I was still trembling when we got off the bike at the office’s parking lot a few minutes later.
Then I stopped for a moment and thought about how I got into that situation. I was making a U-turn, and… where the heck did that old man come from? He was on the other side of the bypass divider, facing the oncoming traffic. And he yelled at me? What the &u©k? How dare he yell at me when I was the victim?
But see, that’s traffic in Indonesia. You’ve got to get used to it. You must adjust yourself and be vigilant at all times, because who the heck knows what the guy in front of you will do in a split-second. He might swerve left, or right, stop smack dab in the middle of the road; heck, he might as well make a U-turn in the middle of a busy highway without so much as activating his turn signal or look at the rear-view mirror. Yes, everything’s possible.
As for my passenger? Not a word she said, even until we got to our cubicles. In fact, not a word she said since she got on the bike behind me. So I guess I’m the weird guy here, because she’s obviously oblivious.