After four hours of sleep, we’re in the car again, this time driving north a couple more hours to Ajanta.

Driving in India appears to be utter chaos. Lane lines are completely ignored, horns are beeping constantly, and cars, trucks, auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, cows, dogs, and anything else you can think of all mix freely.

It’s only after observing for a while that you understand there is actually a method to the madness. The essential rule is that the responsibility for not hitting things is solely up to you. Instead of relying on a passive, lane-based approach where assumptions are made that drivers will not shift left or right as you pass, in India a more active approach is taken. The horn beep means “I’m going to pass you, so please give me room to do so”. As long as no one makes any sudden moves, everything flows quite smoothly. Everyone assumes that everyone else will move in relatively straight lines, and everyone has an uncanny knowledge of the exact dimensions of their vehicle. It is quite common for vehicles to pass within less than an inch of one another, but they almost never touch. If I found myself on a bicycle within an inch of a big truck on the right side, my first instinct would be to flinch left; here that would send me straight into the rickshaw on my left. The people here have overcome that flinching instinct and travel in perfect calmness under such conditions.

The upshot of this system is that traffic is almost always moving. Traffic lights are extremely rare, and stop signs are nonexistent. Most intersections are completely uncontrolled, and traffic constantly flows through them. Given the sheer amount of traffic, and the mix of traffic types, I believe this ends up being a much more efficient system than a more regulated, Western approach. Another nice advantage is that you could close your eyes and wander aimlessly through the busiest intersection, and no one would hit you; in fact, no one would even take notice that something strange was happening.

We have had several drivers in our time here, and they all have skills that would take us years to learn, but Yasin(?) the driver who took us to and around Aurangabad is the champion of them all. I don’t believe he was ever passed, and he would go flying down narrow country roads at over 60mph; on the same road, I might drive 35 if it was completely empty; of course, these roads were nowhere near empty. His ability to squeeze through the narrowest gap, or get just enough out of the way of oncoming traffic was incredible. Most amazing was that he would drive this way and under these conditions for five hours straight and not be phased at all. Most of us, even if we could drive in such conditions, would be exhausted within half an hour.

The caves at Ajanta are in a more beautiful setting than Ellora (a horseshoe-shaped ravine), and they still have remains of paintings covering the walls and ceilings, but the scale of them is a bit smaller. Also since we were working on four hours of sleep, we probably didn’t enjoy them as much as we could have.

Upon our return to Pune that evening, we collected our belongings from the Saxena house and moved out to the Pune Turf Club. We have a row of rooms that open onto a large balcony, with a view of the lawn below and the race track beyond (unfortunately they don’t have horses here until July). In terms of cleanliness and ameneties, the hotel is a bit behind current Western business traveller standards. But I happily trade that for the permeating ambiance of faded luxury that brings us right into the bygone era of the British Raj.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 12:20 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.