Traffic

Having received notice from my Spanish friends Patricia and Agus, Jan and I decided to hire a Indian taxi back to Delhi, as there was no train ticket available for me anymore. Who would expect to learn so much about the Indian culture in just one day!!! The trip started with a 1km walk through Laxman Jhula, crossing the pedestrians bridge packed with Indian tourists taking photos, resting cows, slightly aggressive monkeys and honking motorbikes. The taxi did not wait for us at a place near by -- which would be logical, I imagine it was because the taxi was actually a private car with an illegal driver ;) -- but we carried all out luggage up a hill and found the rather broken car with a driver who spoke 5 words of English. We where told, that the shortest road to Delhi was blocked because of a festival and thus had to pay more for the extra kilometers going on the alternative route. Anyhow the driver still toke the original track -- hoping we might not find out -- and of course we ended up in a jam of cars and frenetic hooting. The Indians are very creative when it comes to driving and of course everybody is excluded from the principal of trust as hardly no one actually seems to know the traffic rules. Our driver followed the example of some other cars and opened a second lane on our side… the third lane followed soon after, just next to the road, crossing front yards, chasing pedestrians of into the herbs ;) The whole game ended up in some kind of Ruggby constellation, 5 lanes of cars (on a 2 lane road) facing each other and no chance to move. We stopped the engine, left the car to stretch our feet and see more of this hopelessly stuck mountain of steel. The good thing is that Indians are very used to waiting and don´t get upset when someone cuts their way or plays the kamikaze game with them -- the one who moves to the side in order to avoid a frontal crash looses...

After an hour or so things started moving again under permanent hooting and cars fighting for every centimeter. When we reached traveling speed again (+/-50 km/h), our driver tried to recover the lost time by overtaking in (a not existing) third lane and hoping for the good will of the other traffic-participants. In middle of this we saw hopelessly overloaded trucks, tractors which lifted their front wheels when accelerating due to the over-weight of the hangers, motorbikes with whole families and from time to time a fruit stand in the middle of the chaos with a guy standing in front of it smiling and trusting that the drivers would see him early enough. Our driver was chewing tobacco and after spitting the red mass out of the window he needed both hands in order to lift the damaged side-window. Grabbing the steering wheel I toke care that the car stayed in track meanwhile. We actually touched the corner-stone once when the driver was looking somewhere else, but by then I already had stopped fearing for my life and started believing in my good Karma, which would keep me from having a car-accident in India.

Did anybody of you actually see a "ghost driver"? ...well, I have seen no less than 5 heading into the wrong direction on a kind of highway ;)

When we reached Delhi we had to show our driver the way to our Hotel, as he only knew the way to the airport… By asking auto-rickshah drivers and following our orientation we finally found the place after a 9 hour trip… Of course the driver tried to make us pay much more, but this could not lower our happiness to having a shower and some sleep before Jan and I would continue our ways in different directions.