Movement of the People

If you are planning to arrive in Indonesia in the next week for an overland trek across the archipelago, may I strongly recommend you postpone your trip. Or find the nearest beach resort and stay there.

The reason for the advice: as many as 20 million Indonesians are on the move for their annual end-of-Ramadan holiday.

Despite extra capacity being provided, planes have been fully booked for weeks if not months. Even with the introduction of a new ticketing system for rail passengers - whereby people can buy seats 30 days in advance - the queues and chaos at the railway stations would deter all but the bravest, or most insane, of travellers. Newspapers have been full of pictures of people scrambling on to trains through windows, hanging out of toilets and crowds 10 deep on platforms.

And how no gangways on to ferries have collapsed under the weight of passengers scrambling to climb aboard remains a mystery. I guess it's experience.

Only the bus stations seem to be relatively calm, with passenger numbers slightly down on previous years' figures. TV news reports are focusing instead on new health and safety tests for buses and drivers, introduced after a spate of deadly crashes in recent months.

This relative tranquillity is likely to be swept aside in the next couple of days and the phrase "snail's pace" will take on a whole new meaning as most factories close down and most civil servants start their leave.

Despite six-lane motorways out of Jakarta being made one-way, traffic jams are likely to be measured in scores of miles, and journeys of only a few hundred miles will be measured in days rather than hours.

It will not be unusual for some people to spend as much time travelling to their home and back as they spend celebrating the end of the fasting month.

Why do they bother to put themselves through such an ordeal?

Family bonds in Indonesia are very strong but out of economic necessity millions of people live apart form their parents, spouses and children to earn a living. It is common for people who earn less than £60 a month to send most of it "back to the kampung", often at the expense of their own health and welfare.

The "mudik", as the mass exodus from the cities to the countryside is called in Indonesian, is often the only time in the year mothers see their children or husbands and wives meet up.

The return mudik is usually even more congested and chaotic because some people, fed up with the grind in the towns, decide to stay in the countryside. Meanwhile, a larger number of people, sparked by the tales of opportunities to earn - relatively-speaking - megabucks decide to try their luck and head back to the smoky, congested cities with their relatives.

Despite their best efforts - by checking identity cards of returnees - the authorities are unable to prevent a mass annual influx into the already cloggingly overcrowded cities. In Jakarta over the past six mudik, according to official statistics, the city's growth has averaged more than 230,000, usually fairly impoverished, souls.

Unsurprisingly with Indonesia's economic growth several per cent lower than what is needed just to absorb all the school leavers into the labour market, many of the newcomers find the cities' streets are not paved with the expected gold. Those that decide to stick it out, particularly in Jakarta, often end up squatting on riverbanks, along railway lines and in any vacant plot they can find.

Seeking to address this, the city's governor has over the past few months embarked on an aggressive eviction programme. Tens of thousands of people have been cleared from land across the capital, often in violent scenes as they seek desperately to defend their makeshift homes and salvage their few meagre possessions.

As with many government policies, however, there is little bigger-picture policy-making involved. The evicted people have often just been dumped elsewhere, effectively just moving the problem rather than solving it.

Urban planning experts criticise the government for having no low-cost house-building programme. With no social welfare system in Indonesia, the evictees are just shunted from pillar to post into what easily can become a vicious spiral of despair.

Perhaps the governor does not want to make life in Jakarta too comfortable? But whatever he does, people will continue to flood to Jakarta and other cities and the mudik is likely to remain part of Indonesian culture for the foreseeable future.