To turn right onto a main road, you have to first move onto the wrong side of the road that you are exiting from. Turn right, into the oncoming traffic. Staying on the right, with the facing traffic weaving past you; wait for a gap on the left hand side of the road. Then….
Close your eyes and ‘merge’ into the traffic moving in your intended direction………
Open your eyes again, and like magic, everything is wonderful, and you find that you are exactly where you want to be! Synchronized chaos.
When I proudly told my friend Ketut that I now knew how to drive around Bali, and that I had mastered the art of turning right, he was horrified.
“If the police see you do that, you in trouble. That’s against the rules!”
What rules?? I can’t see any rules here.
However, Ketut decided that I needed a couple more days of instruction, and tried his best with me. But the language barrier, and the fact that nobody seemed to have any idea about the notion of ‘keeping to the left’, meant that I still couldn’t fathom what was meant to happen when turning right or crossing major junctions.
I still haven’t worked it out. It’s a Nike thing.... Just Do It!!!
Such is the ‘highway code’ of experience, of driving in Bali. Often I feel like closing my eyes and accelerating. Road rage does not exist here - people just seem to take turns. Novel, eh?
No road rage? What about all the horns beeping?
The Bali drivers are noisy, but not aggressive. One of the things that still makes me laugh is when all the motorbikes at the back of a ‘pack’ beep their horns – at the exact moment that a traffic light turns green. Nobody has had a chance to move. But it doesn’t actually seem to mean anything, other than to say “excuse me, the lights are green, folks”……
The taxi drivers are responsible for most of the incessant beeping. They must have RSI from beeping their horns. Taxi drivers in Bali seem to think westerners are incapable of walking 20 metres across the road. I have been beeped at so many times, when simply crossing the road to the beach – often when wearing only bathers and a towel. Where do they think I keep my money?
These ever-hopeful drivers beep at every westerner or tourist who walks by, even when their cars are stuck in non-moving traffic in the middle of Kuta. Why would anyone get in a taxi that’s not going anywhere!! They also beep their horns at people walking in the opposite direction, when the traffic is all being fed in the reverse direction, around the one way system. Now that really is optimistic.
The interesting thing about the traffic jams in Kuta, is that although the taxi drivers suffer so much because of them, they haven’t worked out that they themselves could greatly improve the situation. These poor guys lose so much business, simply because a lot of the time they are driving cars that can’t go anywhere! The whole of Jalan Kuta is often at a standstill, just because of two or three taxis stopped at the beach, near Poppies 1 and Hard Rock.
If the drivers got organized, and all arranged to move over to the side of the road when picking up and dropping off fares outside the Hard Rock Hotel, they might find that they can keep moving, and consequently do a lot more business.
As it is, they stop in the middle of the road, the passengers throw open all the doors, and then proceed to discuss the fare – getting into real difficulty deciding which is the 10,000rp, and which is the 100,000rp note. In the meantime, all of Kuta grinds to a halt while the ‘fare debate’ occurs - except for the motorbike riders, who move, like birds in flight formation, into every possible gap. This includes mounting the footpaths and scattering groups of pedestrians as they jostle for position amongst each other, hoping to get to the front of the pack by the time they get ahead of the offending taxi.
Mind you, it can be a night out in itself, sitting in a traffic jam in Kuta on a hot Friday night. There are so many lovely, funny, wonderful, crazy sights and sounds, that you can forget that you are late meeting your friends for dinner.
But you do have to be able to just sit back and enjoy…….
