Going the distance: 18 hours on a bus to Tegal
The bus conductor stuck his head out of the vehicle’s one and only access point to open air — a small window in the air-conditioned bus — and puffed on his cigarette.
A passenger tried to follow suit.
“You have to queue. You’re not the only one who wants to smoke,” Ibnu said in his thick Javanese accent.
It was around 9 a.m. on Friday, a day before Idul Fitri. The bus, on its way from Jakarta to Pekalongan, Central Java, was hardly moving along the Kanci turnpike in the West Java section of the north coast highway.
It had been 12 hours since the bus left Lebak Bulus bus station in South Jakarta and its 48 passengers were tired and bored.
The bus would normally reach Pekalongan on Java’s north coast in six hours, but the national homecoming ritual meant far more time on the road.
Last year, Idul Fitri saw up to 7.67 million vehicles leave Greater Jakarta, with the traffic peak occurring two days before the holiday.
Joining this year’s stream of homecoming urbanites were two Jakarta Post reporters who were onboard Ibnu’s bus for an assignment in Tegal, about 330 kilometers east of the capital and usually only five hours away.
The bus left the city at 10 p.m. As it exited Cikampek turnpike it immediately got stuck in a traffic jam.
On the previous day the Transportation Ministry said 464,000 vehicles had passed the same highway.
The passengers slept until dawn, when the bus stopped at a restaurant in Patrol, West Java, to allow a pre-dawn meal for the last fasting day of Ramadhan, and a change of drivers.
The bus had covered around 180 kilometers in six hours.
At around 8 a.m. the bus reached Kanci Turnpike, about 90 kilometers east of Patrol, where a queue thousands of cars long crawled for at least 10 kilometers.
Traffic barely budged. Cell phone ringtones broke the strange morning silence in the bus.
Other drivers stepped out to have a better view of the traffic, followed by passengers wishing to stretch their legs.
Locals tried to cash in on the congestion, selling bottled mineral water and snacks. The young ones took up busking.
After about an hour — which felt like days — the bus driver began to get frustrated and decided to turn back to Cirebon to seek an alternative route, only to find that none of his crew knew the way.
Passengers could only moan quietly among themselves.
The driver later decided to follow another bus going east and passengers hoped for the best.
The journey then continued with the bus winding through small northern cities along the border of West and Central Java.
But traffic was just the same.
A passenger tried to get some sleep — but awoke many times only to find the bus was still in the same spot. “Why are we still here?” she grumbled.
During the next few hours, vehicles struggled to find room on the small roads and tried to pass each other. As the sun reached high noon, so did the level of road rage.
Forget Ramadhan restraint: Drivers yelled and a few crashes and bare-knuckle fights entertained edgy travelers.
As many as 48 road accidents were reported during this year’s homecoming rush, claiming 24 lives in West Java alone.
Past noon, police roadblocks forced the bus to go southward through Slawi, a small city, adding 40 kilometers to the normal 65-kilometer distance from Cirebon to Tegal.
Before 2 p.m., as the bus was about to enter Tegal, the city’s altered traffic flow forced the vehicle to take yet another detour.
About an hour later the Post’s reporters finally stepped onto a street in downtown Tegal, ending the 18-hour exhausting journey.(23)
Source: The Jakarta Post
Add comment October 23rd, 2007