JAKARTA, April 9 — Aditya Nugraha, a 21-year-old Indonesian, was travelling from the capital city of Jakarta to his hometown of Palembang on Sumatra island, over 500km away, to celebrate the Hari Raya Aidilfitri holiday this week.
The festival, also called Lebaran in Indonesia, marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. This year, it falls tomorrow, and over 220 million people in Indonesia, which has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, will celebrate it for the entire week.
Aditya was one of the many millions travelling to his home town in a mass exodus known locally as ‘mudik’ and usually marked by hours of traffic jams, especially on the main island of Java.
“We departed from home last night around 9pm, and now it has been 13 hours, and we are still stuck in this very long traffic.
“Hopefully, there will be a solution to this soon,” Aditya told Reuters yesterday as he waited to enter the port in the town of Merak for a ferry to cross from Java to Sumatra.
Drone footage yesterday showed thousands of vehicles queuing to enter the ferries while many more were on the road heading to the port, stretching far outside Merak.
According to the Transport Ministry, people living in Jakarta, a city of 11 million, started leaving the capital over the weekend.
Around 193 million people were expected to travel during the festivities this year, according to a survey by the ministry, around 56 per cent higher compared to the number of travellers during the Eid holidays last year.
— Reuters
