A bit about Transportation by car

February 12, 2012
I'm in the car right now with my family. Yesterday we left from Karawang and drove the six hours to Tegal; after sleeping over, we left for Yogyakarta this morning. We didn't sleep very much last night, though because a dog got run over by a bus in front of grandma's house--everyone heard the crash and screaming and after that we were too alarmed to sleep. On top of that, at grandma's house the bedroom's aren't air-conditioned and the mattresses are traditional cotton-filled Javanese beds. The past two days, I've experienced driving in West but mostly Central Java. Yesterday my sister Dea drove and today my papah is driving. The roads we took to Tegal were brand-new toll roads, with spectacular views of luscious green rice paddies and misty mountains. the toll was a whopping Rp. 25,000 (over $2.50) because it's less than a year old. Now we are taking an alternative route through the mountains, headed to Yogyakarta because the usual road that goes through Semarang is apparently beyond pot-holed and chasmed. In Virginia, roads are worn down and out by erosion, ice, and snow; my mamah and papah say that roads in Indonesia are so terrible because the government skips corners when making the roads--to pocket the money--and the heavy trucks that aren't supposed to be allowed on the poorly-constructed roads bribe officials and use the roads anyways. So, the windy road that we've been hugging through the mountain passes have been unkind to our Honda Freed's tires. We just got back on the road after getting a flat tire changed in a village along the way. It's raining steadily and the sky is cloudy and grey but the circle of mountains, rice paddies, palm trees, clay-tile roofs, and sugar cane plants still brilliantly adorn the countryside. A while ago we passed along a forest of pine trees, which really surprised me. After asking what the trees were called in Indonesian, my family informed me they are called "pinus" (pronounced PEE-nus). I'm not going to lie, my immature insides chuckled. At some points the landscape was breath-taking in the same way that the mountains in Virginia are breath-taking; at times the only visible differences were young banana trees and a lack of any kind of guard-rails.