A first timer‚Äôs guide to driving in India

“He has space but he is just making drama,” says Krishna with a shake of the head and a frown that creases the red blessing on his forehead.

This is the first time in five days that my driver has commented on a road transgression. Opinions are usually expressed via the car horn, which is so well-used it must be due for a service.

The drama in this case is caused by a campervan which has stopped moving due to an oncoming truck. That we are ascending the narrow hairpins of the Nilgiri mountain range on the way to Ooty, a hill station at one of the highest altitudes in southern India, only makes the situation more tense.

Krishna is right, however. The stalled driver is having a tantrum – most Indian drivers, no matter how tight the space, will somehow find a way to squeeze through.

With monkeys, bicycles, motorbikes, cows, people, smoke belching buses, donkeys and dirt-laden tractors all pulling rank on the roads, this is one of the liveliest drives I’ve ever experienced.

Everything is worth a beep when it comes to overtaking; it can serve as a warning, a signal of intent or a rapprochement. Trucks even invite the horn on their rear bumpers. The ritual is written from left to right: “Stop, sound horn, go”, the signs read.

Wherever traffic stops there will be an entrepreneurial man touting trays of sliced cucumber in clear bags. At one intersection, a 4WD filled with a family of twelve winds down a window to examine the wares, then rapidly winds it up again before whizzing off without paying. The vendor makes a token effort to chase as the carload laughs and speeds away.

It is festival time so trucks, buses and cars are festooned with tinsel, smears of coloured paste and marigold flowers. Then again, it’s more likely to be festival time than not when you visit India. There is always a reason to celebrate here, and between the three main religious denominations – Muslim, Hindu and Christian – public holidays are plentiful.

Further down the road a motorbike passenger holds two glass panes the width of a small car in his hands while the driver negotiates the bumps.

Two wheelers have the advantage though – often potholes are so big that there is nothing for four wheelers to do but to go off-road.

Whenever traffic drama settles down, there is village or city or wildlife drama to distract your attention. Many travellers will undertake a wildlife safari in the national parks, however most locals believe you have just as good a chance of spotting a tiger, leopard or elephant on the public roads that cut through the national parks.

Krishna has seen a tiger once in the national parks driving between Mysore and Ooty. He has driven this route at least once a month for more than 20 years, which gives an indication of how rare the encounter is. Elephant sightings, on the other hand, are so frequent they are taken for granted. Krishna stops for me to take photos of the first four we see. After that we drive by without a second glance.

The drive from Bangalore to Ooty is a public view into private worlds. Everything is on display, from the crude to the domestic. Men relieve themselves publicly, women wash clothes, workers pick cotton and mothers prepare evening meals.

Large families stand by the roadside and have lunch on paper plates, eating from metal tins of rice. Krishna suggests we picnic like the local road trippers do. The Indian way is to stand and eat over the bonnet. You don’t sit on the ground because there are no rubbish bins, so the junk is discarded as far away as it can be thrown. Krishna is aghast when I suggest we hold onto the rubbish in the car to put in a bin and as counter-intuitive as I find it, I shake my preconceptions about the immorality of littering and manage to throw away my sandwich box. I feel guilty all the same.

Coconut stalls are found near these roadside picnic spots, with stallholders expertly carving the coconut into a drink with five strokes of a fierce looking curved knife.

Some parts of the driving experience are more perplexing however. A toll station in Tamil Nadu, on the road to Kerala, has eight separate check points. Eight times you must pull over and display the same ticket to prove you paid the 31 rupee fee (about 50 cents) despite some of the stations being in clear sight of others.

But that’s what makes driving in India so captivating. Even on an eight hour car journey, there was no thought of nodding off. India is theatre at its finest.

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