Cowbright: Fill 'Er Up, Please!

Indonesians need gas, and lots of it. Right now gas is about 98 cents a liter (or approximately $4US per gallon). I never have to concern myself with gas here since that's the driver's job. But occasionally I'm in the car with him when he stops to buy gas. At home I pump my own gas and am always careful to turn the engine off before I do, as I have always been under the impression that it was dangerous to pump gas with the engine running. I guess I thought something horrible would happen, like the car would explode or catch fire.

But here, no one turns off the engine to pump gas. You just wait your turn in line and one of the many attendants will fill your tank. Hmm...that's different. Not only the leaving your car running part, but actually having someone else pump the gas. As I've said, there are lots of people to do lots of jobs, so an Indonesian would never have to pump their own gas.

The motors (scooters) line up in a different area and occasionally the lines are quite long. As you can see from these photos, the gas stations here are nice and modern.

However, for as long as we've been here I've noticed little shelves of bottles full of yellow liquid for sale along the roadsides and wondered what they were. For awhile, I even thought they were the bottles of yellow liquid that the tukang jamus (medicine women) carry around.

I recently learned that they contain oil and gas for people who need a fill up when no gas stations are around. There really are not an abundance of nice stations for a city this size. These bottles hold enough gasoline for motors and I suppose might keep a car from running out before they could get to a gas station. I have since learned that some of the bottles contain plain gasoline and others contain a mix of oil and gasoline for scooters that have a two-cycle engine.