For some reason that I can’t recollect, I’d arranged a car and driver for the trip from Agra to Ranthambore. Our only other option was train, and I’d always heard that Indian trains are in ill repair, never on time, crowded, and generally nasty. As it turns out, I was right about the trains, but since I had no point of reference, I had no assumptions about traveling three hundred kilometers by car.
Remembering my blog When Yes Means No, I should have been more than a little suspicious about responses I got when I tried to get some specific information about the trip. Estimates ranged from four to eight hours for the journey, road conditions from good to not so with some construction, and facilities (toilets, food, etc) from no problem to non-existent. I got the hotel to pack box lunches, nixed a stop by the “baby Taj Majal”, and directed the driver to start an hour earlier than initially planned. In addition, I had a cautionary conversation with both the travel agent’s rep and the driver requesting that the driver slow down and drive less aggressively than he had the day before. I blamed the request on S’s propensity for car sickness, but the truth is I was more than a little scared.
The driver got the message and for the exit from Agra he never drove more than fifteen mph and was literally creeping around corners and refused to pass even the slowest camel cart. I was boxed in. If I let him continue at the same pace, we’d not get there until next week, and if I gave him the green light, our lives were in his hands. I took the middle ground, nudging him forward and making approving comments when he tentatively passed a bicycle rickshaw. He slowly but surely picked up steam, but not at the frenetic pace of our two previous trips with him.
The first 175 km or so was the same conditions that we’d seen before, except it was two lanes, at least that was the intent of the highway engineers. But of course, it was not uncommon to see vehicles of all sorts four abreast. There was the requisite horn blowing which continued unabated for the entire seven and a half hours. Not only was there no respite, there was no mercy. Our driver, honked at all motorized vehicles, goat herds, random but frequent cows, bicycle and motor cycle riders, women carrying pots of water or bundles of sticks on their heads, small children playing in the streets, and push cart vendors. All with equal intensity.
The last one hundred km was the road from hell. We had been driving on a bad two lane road with potholes, but we quickly digressed to a single lane road with potholes. The real problem was that the amount and type of on coming traffic was the same. Overcrowded busses, trucks hauling giant piles of stuff, camel carts, et al. For at least ninety of the one hundred km, road works of a sort were under way. The three foot drop-offs at the edge of the road was marked by small stones painted white. Imagine with me for a moment hurtling down a single lane road barely paved with a significant drop-off on one side and two camels, a rickshaw, and a lady carrying a baby and three hundred pounds of sticks on the other side while a forty year old bus with three times the number of allowable passengers was coming straight at us. This scenario repeating itself once every ninety seconds.
It was nothing short of amazing that we came across only three major accidents. I thought Ranthambore would never appear, but thank god it did…..just before S. and I both lost our sanity. We drove through the village towards the park, and were made somewhat uneasy when Sinul, our driver, started stopping every two minutes to ask directions to our hotel. I had hoped first of all that our hotel would be obvious, and secondly, even if not obvious, that Sinul would know where it was. It was not and he did not. We finally turned from one dirt lane onto and even smaller dirt lane and drove until we saw a guy in a uniform with a turban bowing and praying us to enter. We had found paradise.
