A visit to Jakarta wouldn't be complete without stories about transport madness in a city on the way to a fifty million population by mid century.
One Australian family took a breezy two hour drive out towards the mountains on the way to neighbouring Bandung recently only to spend more than seven hours coming back.
Next month Bandung - once known as the Paris of Java for its cool climate, history and cultural life - will start building ski-lifts to get people between tourist sites so they don't spend all day in the traffic. 
This might explain why there is a resigned forebearance afoot about the way President Joko Widodo has dealt with the most geopolitically significant infrastructure project in Asia this year: the Jakarta to Bandung fast train.
The diplomatic significance of this project was underlined during last week's regional summit season when Japan revealed it was planning to ease its infrastructure lending requirements after being comprehensively outmanouvered by China to get a foothold in the Asian country which most needs a massive rail overhaul.
This is Indonesia's version of the Darwin port saga or the NSW power station sell-off except its happening in a country with much greater need for investment and involves a direct showdown between China and Japan.
Now this week a 1000 member Japanese business mission is in Jakarta for an audience with the president - that's three times the size of the much vaunted Australian group Andrew Robb led last week which didn't get a trip to the palace.
Widodo certainly needs to repair bridges to Japan after cancelling a long running plan for a $5 billion high speed train to Bandung and probably beyond just when the competition between Japanese and Chinese interests was getting intense.
Weeks later the government announced China had the job after all because it had agreed to do the whole thing privately with none of the fussy government loan guarantees required by Japan.
Indonesians with links to Japanese business say it is commonly believed that Chinese bidders accessed the planning Japan has done over the years to build a local bullet train, pulled some state owned enterprises (SOE) into a notionally private consortium and presented a fait accompli to a government which is struggling to get infrastructure promises off the ground.
Bizarrely the state enterprises minister Rini Soemarno has denied any knowledge of Japanese planning for rail lines across Java.
Some economists like William Hickey argue that the Indonesian SOE involvement means that project failure will simply end up back on the Indonesian government balance sheet anyway. Or alternatively the Chinese will do a turnkey project with imported workers and none of the technology transfer for future rail that Indonesia was demanding of Japan.
IMA Asia business consultant Jim Castle says that while the government has done an "unattractive policy somersault" and China's Indonesian project track record is poor "this is Beijing's first overseas win for a high-speed train (an area it has big hopes for), so it will be under pressure to deliver."
However property developer SD Darmono had some bracing advice for Australian business people in Indonesia last week looking at infrastructure and other business opportunities.
He told the Indonesia Australia Business Council conference: "China is different (to Japan). They want to come to Indonesia. They want to sell their goods here. It goes back to foreign governments do they want to have a long term role in Indonesia?"
China is estimated to have built about 50,000 km of tollroads in the past decade while Indonesia has only 1150 km in existence. So it seems the Chinese train builders have hit a well timed sweet spot in a country where the government has big plans for desperately needed infrastructure but can't get the money out the door.
This raises a question for Australia's strategic planners about whether Indonesia may be tilting towards a closer embrace of China.
A new Sydney University US Studies Centre report says Widodo's mercantilist approach to foreign policy could drive an increased emphasis on ties to China if it is more responsive to Indonesia's needs for finance to support infrastructure and defence upgrades. But it argues that Indonesia - which has long had security ties with the US - is really only playing catch-up with China rather shifting into an alignment.
"Already, Chinese infrastructure projects have provoked overtly anti-Chinese coverage in the Indonesian media critical of poor government regulation of a "flood" of Chinese workers," the study warns.
Reading this familiar story it is hard not to think that those strange neighbours - Australia and Indonesia - might have a bit more to talk about.