Ted's Adventures

I love South East Asia, especially Bali; people are so resourceful. In Canada you would never see a family of four, happily going somewhere on a motor scooter. This would break so many laws, and I’m sure the Children’s Aid Society would be involved, evaluating the suitability of these parents.

At first, I was horrified when I saw this. I admit though, I was looking at it in the context of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Here, we protect our children with a passion. Every small kid in a car needs to be securely strapped into a car seat, even then, they are only relegated to the safety of the back seat.

How could parents take risks like this with their kids? Especially in city traffic where cars whizz by doing 60 in a 50 KPH zone; it would be sheer madness, especially if the kids became whiney or fidgety.

This is not the only scary thing about these scooters. If you’d see the traffic, you would be appalled. Scooters don’t seem to obey any rules. They pass on the right, they pass on the left, they pass between cars… in Montreal, this would be suicidal.

Life must be pretty cheap there if they don’t take better care of their kids.

People often say, looks are deceiving, but in this case, I would say, “Situations are deceiving.”

Bali, and South East Asia in general, are very different from Canada. Cars are a luxury, most people drive scooters, they use them for everything. They are used as daily transport, as taxis, and as delivery vehicles. You can often see people bringing home heavy bags of cement on a scooter or delivery men with hundreds of boxes of soap tied onto their scooters. A family of four on a scooter is a common occurrence; I’ve even seen 6 on a few occasions.

So, what’s different? Well, for one thing, the roads are quite narrow; you really can’t go very fast. In fact, cars and scooters rarely go above 30 KPH, in the city, and 50 – 60 KPH in the countryside. That alone makes a big difference.

Also, the car drivers have a culture of sharing the road; they know that when there is any traffic, the scooters will flow around them like water around a rock in a river. This is expected and does not cause the hostile incidents that would ensue in Canada: horns blaring, and road rage havoc!

So, given this normal situation in Bali, this European family in the picture is not reckless at all. They are happily doing what the locals do so very successfully. But I do have some advice for them; like they say on “Myth Busters,” and some of the Science demonstration shows… “Don’t try this at home folks.”