Tales From Jakarta: The One Shoed Man

Local Beer

On our first night in Jakarta we visited Stadium, having read so many good things online about the place. We stumbled out of the club at four a.m., discussing philosophy for some reason, and looked for a cab to take us back to the hotel. Now we knew that in Jakarta we had to be careful, which is why we wanted to take a cab as quickly as possible, so as to avoid staggering around at night. We figured once we were in a cab we were home free, wrong.

Out of the club and walking along the main road we were sort of shepherded into a cab. The cab driver paid some money to our shepherd, which we all thought was weird, and we were off to our hotel. Now for some reason the topic of the night seemed to be philosophy so we were all engrossed in a discussion about our own mortality and the meaning of things as we drove back. Halfway through my explanation of Indra's Net we realized that things started looking less and less familiar and that we had been in the cab for longer than felt right. 

There was a real language barrier for us in Jakarta and trying to communicate with our very local cab driver seemed futile. Still as we asked if we were going the right way and if he knew the hotel he reassured us by making an approving grunt and pointing forward. This kept on for a couple more minutes, by this time discussion had stopped as we watched the road intently, until we got onto a bridge. Here the whole car seemed to shake and then shut off. "Out of gas."

The car slowly rolled to a stop on the bridge, the driver repeating "taxi dead, no gas" before going out to the front of the cab to pop the hood and verify that there indeed is no gas, how you are able to determine this by looking in the front of the car is beyond me. 

So we got out of the cab, noticed we were on a bridge over a landfill of some sort, and had no idea whatsoever about where we were. As the cabbie came over to the sidewalk with us I made an important observation whose implications would reverberate throughout the rest of the trip [not really], the cab driver had one shoe! 

As we stood there dumb struck, and still a bit drunk, we were debating about whether it would be good to try and walk to the hotel, the driver had assured us we were close and it was "this way", or to try and hail another cab. It was about this point that we all noticed something else, it was prayer time in Jakarta. The sounds of  the prayer mixed with the ridiculousness of the man having one shoe and the slight danger in all of this made the event ridiculous. 

Eventually another cab came over and picked us up, we had to pay off the one shoed driver something and ended up giving him less than half of the metered price. Turns out we were going in the opposite direction although we were pretty close to our hotel. As our new fully shoed driver made a U-turn we noticed that the last cab had magically created gas and was now off the road. Less than five minutes later we were back at the hotel and could laugh at the whole ordeal. 

The moral of the story: only take blue bird group cabs in Jakarta.