I headed off on a long all-day tour down to the city of Agra and back yesterday, primarily to see the Taj Mahal, but also to see some of the other historic sites around the area.
The whole experience of getting there and back is something I don’t think I will ever forget. The drive took about four hours each way, and was about as treacherous as anything I’ve ever experienced. It doesn’t seem as though India has any safety regulations on its roads. Even when we were travelling down a paid turnpike, the road was full of roaming cows (I was wondering where all these sacred cows were since I hadn’t seen any in Delhi), camels and horses pulling carts, bicycles, motorcycles, motorised tricycles, pedestrians, buses, and trucks. And never a police officer in sight.
People generally drive down the middle of the road here, straight over the white lines — presumably to avoid hitting pedestrians and other dark, shadowy, slow-moving traffic. This means everyone who comes up behind must honk their horn to get drivers to pull over. Many trucks even have big signs painted on their backs asking you to honk. All you hear the whole way is horns honking continuously. Every time you hit a traffic jam, the road appears about as organised as a clogged bumper car ride — with vehicles pointed in just about every direction.
One of the more unsettling experiences came when our van got a flat tire in the middle of the trip. The driver merely pulled halfway out of the lane onto the shoulder on an outer curve of the highway. We weren’t ever asked to get off the vehicle. Instead, we just sat there while he repaired the flat. While we sat there, large overloaded trucks continually came barrelling around the curve up from behind us and quickly had to swerve out of our lane to get into the clear lane. It was unbelievable!
At night, there were many vehicles on the road with no reflective material of any kind—including some oversized trucks that would be barred from most Western roads without a lead and follow-up vehicle and lots of flashing lights. The air at night was full of smoke from fires lit by all the homeless people living in tents along the road trying to keep warm, or from big, onerous factories belching black fumes from their smokestacks. Our van would typically come barreling down the highway to stumble across a giant, dark, mysterious shape that would turn out to be a slow-moving cart or truck pulling a massively over-packed load. There was no break in speeding traffic. The whole experience was quite scary, but I never actually saw any accidents.
