Road Trip

Road Trip

Terrified passengers screamed. The driver screamed at the oncoming traffic. A man's body hung sideways into the roadway from his outstretched arm as he screamed into the night from the doorless step-well.

Horns honked incessantly. Heads went down into crossed arms wedged against the back of the seat in front of them, eyes pressed closed. Had we flown halfway around the world just to die? It surely seemed that way.

Fifty of us with our luggage, the driver and the yelling man lurched and rolled as the bus barreled down the Cochin Airport Road headed for Amritapuri. Our luggage was piled high across the double back seat where I, last to come aboard, sat on top of it. I held onto the poles that anchored the seats in front of me so that my arms were wrenched straight out to each side like Christ.

From my precarious and shifting perch I had an unobstructed view through the windshield and could see what was coming at us from each side as well. If we were going to be killed on this highway, I intended to watch.

Most of us had flown from San Francisco on the midnight flight to Singapore, where we spent nine hours before boarding our final flight to Cochin, in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. After gathering our belongings, passing through customs, changing dollars into rupees (thousands of them!), finding the Ashram bus in the midnight heat and dragging our exhausted selves and luggage on board, we were really feeling the strain of the nearly two-day trip and had expected to snooze our way south.

Instead, we learned the rules of the Indian road:
• Never stop. No matter what's going on; if you stop, you lose.
• Everyone yells all the time.
• Everyone honks all the time.
• There are no traffic lights.
• The line dividing the lanes on a two-lane highway is just a suggestion.

People drive on any feasible bit of opening that presents itself. Even if that happens to be your lane, and the other guy's heading straight for you. He'll quickly deek at the last second to avoid collision, passing you on one side or the other with a hair's breadth to spare - anything to avoid stopping.