Aug 24th

The video I just posted shows the majority of my commute from school to home. After the goat you proceed another kilometer or so bang a left at the rotary, and then you’re home sweet home. Although nothing remotely close to my commute back in the states this drive is very tame compared to most journeys I’ve been on here. It was not rush hour and I work on the outskirts of town and I live even further from town. I will try and get some more lively videos when someone else is driving. As someone once told me the roads are only a suggestion. There are no lanes or stripes and people use every part of the road which can sometimes be the part that you happen to be in. Horns are used for overtaking and at any given time you are being passed or are passing someone else so there are always a hundred or so horns going off. My trusty steed has a broken horn so I’m easy to spot; I’m the overly cautious guy with white knuckles yelling “beep”.

Driving here is not completely different from the states. Back in Connecticut I have come around a corner and found a cow in my lane of the road…once! Here I slalom my way through dozens of them in the 2 miles between work and home. All types of cows; brown ones, bonny ones, horned ones, little ones, cows lying down, cows standing up, ones that are sleeping, some that I hope are just sleeping. Whatever kind they are, they are everywhere and fearless, “this looks like a good spot; I think I’ll lay down right here in the street for a few days and make the humans drive around me.” The majority of them are also much larger than my 150cc Yamaha crux, and public opinion gives cows the right of way, and exonerates them of any fault in cow people traffic accidents, they are impervious to my existence.

Besides cows I share the road with goats, water buffaloes, camels, donkeys, dogs, the occasional pig, and humans; lots of humans. I will have to grab a few pictures of some of these vehicles the next time I am out but rest assured, they are numerous and various in nature. The majority of people ride scooters or small motorcycles, there are so many that the first day at school I came out at the end of school and couldn’t find my bike right away. I’ve seen as many as four people on a single motorcycle, but I am most impressed with the women who ride on back side saddle. One great thing I have seen are electric scooters, about five or so, which is five more than I’ve seen in the states. Bicycles are pretty standard it looks like there is one manufacture that makes one style and offers the same color scheme as the model T; some even look to be that old. I saw one today that had solid rubber tires. There are also many different types of three wheeled vehicles (auto rickshaws) that go by various names. Yesterday my roommate suggested that I take a gypsy into town, “a what…?” I still have no idea what that is. There are also a large number of very large tricycles that rule the rode carrying building supplies, goods, half a dozen people, whatever. This larger variety seems to be the cooperation of the front half of an old Enfield motorcycle (a very cool bike when still in one piece) and the back half of a pickup truck. Any other available room on the road is filled with fruit carts, wagons, large tractors, buses, trucks, pedestrians, and even some cars. The Tata Nano (the cheapest car in the world) is just being released here and will be manufactured not all that far from here. Hopefully I might be able to arrange a class trip to the manufacturing site once it is operational. An affordable car capable of holding five or so people would be a great thing for the roads here if everyone carpooled. Otherwise I would not be able to imagine the congestion on the streets that an additional half a million cars a year will make.

My brief stay in Delhi makes me thankful that I do not have to travel those streets regularly. On the streets of Delhi you would see the same usual suspects described on the streets of Rajkot only increased by some large factor. On the trip from the hotel to the airport our taxi had a very brief yet thorough encounter with a guy on a scooter. We were leaving the rotary at the same time this other guy was entering the rotary and we side swiped each other, THUD! I thought immediately we should pull over, call the police, and exchange insurance information, right? The vehicles never stopped, the scooter pulled alongside our taxi as we drove down the road and there was a brief exchange in Hindi. As best I could tell they both agreed that it was the other guys fault and then we split ways, that’s conflict resolution. Get in a traffic accident in Delhi…check.

So the roads are crazy but I love it, I will never complain about traffic again.