Three's a charm??

Ronnie after ojek ride home in the rain

Well, we started with a new driver today – the third one in a week’s time. I don’t have the highest hopes that this one will work out any better. We decided after much debate that the better thing for us to do as far as transportation here was to rent a car and driver. Ronnie has been making do on getting to ITB with the angkots and ojeks but those just don’t work for me. We tried taxis for a couple of months, but they proved unreliable, meaning you couldn't always count on them showing up. A couple of times we found cab drivers that we really liked, but they might be on the other side of town or tied up when we needed them. Eventually we realized that we were not going to be happy relying on public transportation, especially now that rainy season has arrived. 

typical angkot - most popular form of public transportation

We gave some thought to buying a car (several people tried to convince us to go that route) but neither of us wanted the risk/liability. We have been told that when there's an accident, the one who pays is the one who has money. It doesn't matter who's at fault. So it eventually came back around to renting a car and driver. We decided to go with TRAC, even though they were a little higher because they were supposedly the most reputable, having trained drivers who work well with expats. We asked for just two things – that the driver have Thursday off so that he could take us to church on Sunday. Check. The second was that he could speak some English. Uh, check.

Ok, so the first driver, Mr. Edi,  was nice and understood a little bit of English (about as much as I do Bahasa, which isn’t saying much) but he was able to get us where we needed to go. However, the company didn’t bother to inform him that he had to work on Sundays, which he was not willing to do. So our relationship with Mr. Edi ended after the first 3 days. 

The second driver Mr. Hendra was a nice young man, but not as experienced a driver (one close call) and definitely didn’t know the city. For example, he didn't know where ITB was when Ronnie asked to be taken to work. Later, I asked him to take me to the store on Friday, knowing it was only about 5 minutes from our apartment. After about 15 minutes I realized that we were definitely not on the way to the store and that he didn’t have a clue where it was. In his defense, I said Setiabudhi market and he was driving down Setiabudhi street. I managed to phone my Bible study leader Marcia and she (being fluent in Bahasa) was able to get him back to the supermarket. We made it back, so no harm done. Then in the afternoon I gave him an address for where I wanted to get my hair cut and he indicated he knew where it was. I knew it was maybe 15 minutes or so from the apartment, so after that period of time I started getting suspicious again that he didn’t know where he was going. Long story short, he drove me around in traffic for ONE SOLID HOUR, insisting every time I asked that he knew where it was and that we were close!! He kept stopping and asking pedestrians, food cart workers and even a lady on the side of the road who was getting lice picked out of her hair. My nerves were pretty shot by the time I finally arrived for my haircut - 45 minutes late. As a side note, the hairdresser ended up doing a WHACK JOB this time and got it way too short!!! Sigh…

So this morning we met the new (third) driver, Mr. Dadang. After profuse apologies, we were set to try driver #3, hoping the third time would be a charm. But by asking questions, we were able to determine that he had never driven for them before (Ronnie was suspicious because he wasn’t wearing the TRAC uniform shirt). In fact, we have no knowledge that he has ever driven for ANYONE before! He may be just used to driving his scooter around town for all we know. So this afternoon Ronnie decided to give it a whirl and go to the store. Ronnie had to show him the way there (anyone who lives in this part of the city knows where Setiabudhi market is – it’s somewhat of a landmark). Not only did he not know how to get there, he couldn’t figure out how to get back either. So I don’t have high hopes for Mr. DaDang. All of these guys seem nice enough (if you can tell that when someone doesn’t talk) but just not real qualified as drivers. It just seems like everything here is more difficult than it should be. Such is life in Bandung.