It is something of a sight to see, for Indonesians, when I ride our motorcycle anywhere. I’m a woman – a bule woman at that – riding a blue and purple man’s bike very fast, and I have a man riding on the back! This is completely unheard of. You never see a woman riding with the man on the back. Never. Couple that with the fact that my hair in the wind, from under my helmet, is like some kind of waving blonde beacon in the sun that draws everybody’s eyes to me, and you get lots of commotion. Near accidents. Things like that.

As people are yelling at me (usually ‘EY!’ or ‘Wooo! Mister, mister!’ – very articulate) they are ignoring miracles that are happening on the same road, not a half-block away. I know that in America we have NASCAR, and we have highways where the speed limit is 75, and we have, especially in Colorado, mountain roads that wind so steeply you feel like you’re on a rollercoaster. We have downtown traffic jams that don’t move for hours, and we have motorcycles that weave around in the 1 centimeter of space between the stalled cars without losing control. We have motorcyclists who speed over jumps, who fly over any number of obstacles to land squarely on their wheels. I realize all this. But you haven’t seen impressive, you haven’t seen amazing, until you’ve seen a little old Indonesian man manuevering his groaning, creaking old motorcycle over a half-eroded gravel road with a straight drop to the ocean on one side and honking taxis on the other – carrying AT LEAST 300 EGGS STRAPPED TO HIS BACK.

People do this. They gathered their eggs across the bay, and they sell their eggs in Jayapura. But there are no delivery trucks, at least not the way we think about them. You have to ride in the truck with your produce. So what do you do? Strap 300 eggs to your back, of course! You see these guys, and they all invariably have crappy motorcycles that look as though they’re about to fall apart. From the back, you can’t see the guy. All you see is carton upon carton of eggs, at least as tall as the person riding and about four times as wide, lashed together on all sides with rope (I mistyped and typed ‘hope’, which is probably not entirely inaccurate), wobbling away down the road. And it’s not as though there’s no other traffic; it’s not as though the roads are all perfect. No, everybody honks at the egg guy, because he goes slowly. He goes slowly because, on any road at any time, there could suddenly be a ten foot deep hole, or a flood from a water pipe breaking, streaking down the middle of the road, or a mother chicken with her chicks all in a line behind her, or a lost cow, or a sideways pickup spilling durian and mango. But people still honk at him, instead of saluting him. Nice.