Thankfully after a few long days driving I’ve managed to type up the next update. We’re in Bandar Abbas at the moment, on the Persian Gulf coast of Iran. Iran has been surreal and frustrating for the 3 days we’ve been here. Since we crossed the Pakistan/Iran border we’ve been under constant armed police escort, which has normally consisted of a ute full of dudes weilding AK47’s. At night we’d even have a guy in the back seat of the Hilux with us, AK47 between their legs, and a Beretta on their hip. Thankfully we’re out of the ‘dangerous’ area now, and we’re hopefully going to make better progress in the next few weeks. More on that later! Here’s a quick rundown of our drive north from Chennai, where we picked up the Hilux from the port, to Kathmandu. Enjoy!
Chennai to Kathmandu: 2 - 5 February 2008
So now we finally had the Hilux we were two weeks behind schedule, and Simon’s mate Pat was flying into Kathmandu on the 5th February to meet us for some trekking in the Himalayas. The prospect of driving from Chennai to Kathmandu in four days would’ve been a dream until very recently, but luckily for us the Indian Government has almost finished building what’s known as The Golden Quadrilateral, a dual-carriageway highway linking the big four cities of Chennai, Kolkotta, New Delhi and Mumbai.
Now I wouldn’t be the first person to describe driving in India as crazy, and it is. But the funny thing is it seems to work because it’s so simple. You just ignore all those troublesome aspects of driving like indicators, lanes, traffic lights, headlights, right-of-way, rearview mirrors, speed limits, etc etc, and replace them with one thing, the horn. You also learn very quickly to assume nothing and expect absolutely anything.
The cities are pretty straight-forward, because the roads are generally so congested that speeds are low, and it’s simply a case of pointing where you want to go and honking almost incessantly until you get there. As I mentioned before, traffic lights and give way rules are non-existent. The concept of ‘might-is-right’ where you give way to everything bigger than you, doesn’t even always apply. But the solid bullbar on the front of the Hilux is a fairly good deterrent to any ambitious rickshaw drivers.
Highway driving was a whole new experience from city driving. The classic example was not far north of Chennai. We were happily cruising along at 70 or 80km/h in the fast-lane of a nice dual-carriageway (two lanes each way, separated by a raised median strip), when suddenly a truck came over a rise directly toward us in our lane. After the split-second of disbelief wore off, Simon managed to swerve to the left and avoid the oncoming truck as well as the endless stream of pedestrians, pushbikes, rickshaws and motorbikes plodding along in the left lane. This was not an uncommon occurrence, and we soon learnt that if an Indian wants to get to somewhere on the other side of the median strip, they won’t think to go past it to the next turning point and come back at it from the correct direction, they’ll simply cut onto the wrong side and run the gauntlet. Everyone from pushbikes to buses was doing it, but once we knew to keep an eye out for them it was fine, but there were a few close calls, especially at night. Sometimes everyone had to do it, as large sections of road weren’t finished, so without warning our side of the road would suddenly finish in a pile of dirt (or often an unfinished bridge) and we’d have to swerve across a rutted and bumpy patch of dirt onto the opposite lanes, and pray. These stretches of unfinished or half-finished highway often lasted kilometres, and in one case in Orissa, a whole state. Dogs, goats and cows wandered the highways as they pleased providing challenging slow-moving obstacles, and at one point we almost ran over an old woman who had blocked off the whole fast-lane with rocks and spread out her rice to dry.
Railway crossings are a good illustration of the mentality of the average Indian driver. When the barriers are down they won’t wait in a queue like you’d expect, they’ll crowd up to the barrier using the whole width of the road, on both sides of the tracks. I’m sure you can imagine the mayhem when the barriers come up. The nett effect of this on everyone’s progress is easily negative, but yet they still do it every time.
Other highlghts were the liberal (ie constant) use of highbeam at nights, ridiculously overloaded trucks, dodgy toll-gate officials trying to rip us off, nice toll gate officials seeing we were tourists and letting us through for free, piles of gravel randomly dotted across the road, potholes larger than some of the mines I’ve worked in, wrecked trucks left perched on the shoulder, and the endless entertainment of reading the bizarre phrases Indian truck drivers would adorn their hideously signwritten trucks with.
As night fell the roads cleared up somewhat, and my initial apprehensions were calmed by the fact that driving was almost safer at night because all the local traffic cleared off and we only had to deal with the slow-moving, but very courteous, truck drivers.
We shared the driving between Josh Si and I, and for the first two days we drove until no-one felt awake enough to drive, then picked a spot to camp and sleep for a few hours til daylight. The first night we went a fair way off the highway and found a nice quiet spot. The second night we weren’t so lucky, and every square metre of flat land for kilometres was taken up with rice paddies, so we resorted to sleeping just off the highway. I’m guessing they don’t have much entertainment in the town of Budbud, because we woke to a massive crowd of locals, who obviously found our presence a lot more interesting than their ride to work. So, barely awake, and slightly taken aback, we packed up the tent and fought our way to the back of the ute to pack it away, and wishing the silent but cheerful crowd goodbye we made our way back onto the highway.
We’ve struck crowds like that the whole way, and now that we’re used to it it’s not so bad. To be fair that’s exactly why we chose to drive our own vehicle -to see the areas that are off the normal tourist trail. Whenever we stop for chai or lunch the same thing happens. Whichever stall we choose instantly becomes the most popular spot in the village, and everyone (actually normally only the guys) will happily stand arund and watch us do whatever we’re doing. Normally there’ll be one dude who plucks up the courage to attempt a conversation, and with broken English and a bit of hand waving we manage. I’m not claiming we’re new-age missionaries or anything, but it is nice to be able to provide a friendly face for the western world!
For the last stretch to the Nepal border we had to go off the ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ and negotiate a few hundred kilometres of smaller raods, to the border crossing at Raxaul/Birganj. The bridge over the Ganges River just out of Patna provided some hair-raising entertainment. The concrete bridge is constructed in segments about 50m long on each bridge support, with a steel zig-zag join between each segment, like you see on bridges everywhere. The catch was that every time a vehicle (especially the trucks) passed over these joins, the concrete from the first section would pop back up, and the concrete in the section the truck drove onto would have to take the weight and sink, leaving ’steps’ of up to about 10cm in the joins. We watched in fascinated horror for the whole 7.5km length of the bridge.
After driving through the night, we reached the Nepal border at 0700, and after almost inadvertantly driving straight across (it’s easier than it sounds), we were flagged down and pointed towards immigration, where the immigration dude tried to con us into paying 50 rupees for the departure card. Tired and not in the best of moods, we told him politely where he could stuff his 50 rupee ‘fee’ and eventually walked out with passports stamped. Then the fun began. To get the Hilux into each country without having to pay import duty at every border, we have an internationally recognised document called a Carnet en Passage Douanes, which we have to have stamped and correctly filled out whenever we enter and leave each country. Long story short, if it isn’t filled out properly we could be liable to pay up to AUD$65,000 in import duties/fines. This was the first border we’d crossed in the Hilux, so we were a bit nervous abot the whole thing. So after being offered a chai and a seat outside the customs office to wait and watch the mass of locals crossing the border in the early morning sun, the customs officer eventually emerged, and he took me over to another office to do the paperwork. After we finally found the right ledger to record the details in, it soon became apparent he had no idea what he was doing, as he had to read the entries on the previous pages, then ask me what they meant, and then where each bit of information was on our carnet document before he painstakingly copied it verbatim inot the ledger (even though the people who designed the carnet supplied a perforated rip-off section on each page for exactly that purpose). It wasn’t until the last line that I realsied he was filling in the imports section of his ledger, even though we were leaving India at the time. He took a fair bit of convincing, but I eventually got hold of the ledger, found the exports section and showed him the right place to re-write all of the stuff he’d just written. It was at this point he apologetically explained in broken English that sometimes the job of customs officer at Raxaul is deputised out, obviously to whoever is unlucky enough to be in the office at the time the actual customs officer decides he’s going to have a day off (or maybe even the cleaner, who knows). I did feel sorry for the guy after hearing that. We eventually got everything recorded, and after much discussion between him and a colleague who’d turned up to help, and me virtually ripping the carnet our of his hands before he stamped it in the wrong place, we had all the stamps and signatures in the right place, so I got out of there as fast as I could before they changed their mind! An hour and a half after we pulled up, we were off to Nepal!
After the relaxed nature of the Indian side of the border, the first thing we saw when we crossed the bridge into Nepal was lots of soldiers with guns, unfortunately soldiers with guns turned out to be a common sight throughout the country. They were nice enough to point us in the direction of the immigration office, where a friendly Nepalese immigration official politely tried to tell us there was a 100 rupee fee on top of the USD$30 for the visa. I think the dudes with guns outside soothed our tempers a bit, but when we politely told him where to stick his 100 rupee fee, he merely shrugged and got on with issuing our visas. The guy at the customs building took the carnet off me, and in less than 15 minutes it was ready to go, and he even changed some Indian rupees to Nepalese rupees for us.
He also offered some advice -get out of town. It turns out we’d stumbled into what’s known as a bandh, a bizarre type of regional strike normally called by a minor political party as a protest to the government, which causes massive economic disruption (which ironically hurts the locals most), and is enforced by the calling party with threats of violence if anyone breaks it. Tensions were high, and we took the most direct route out of there. Just on the edge of town we came across one roadblock of burning drums and concrete blocks. I wasn’t keen to stop, and managed to squeeze the Hilux through a gap without anyone getting too agitated.
We decided to take the scenic route to Kathmandu, known as the Tribhuvan Highway, which on paper looks a lot shorter, but instead of skirting around the big hills like the main highway does, it winds it’s way right over them. It was a long drive, but the road was excellent (although narrow), and being amongst the foothills of the Himalayas the panoramic views of the mountains got us excited for what was to come in the next couple of weeks.
Finally after driving 3000km -the last 36 hours of which we didn’t even stop for sleep to make sure we met Pat on time, we got to the guest house we were supposed to be meeting at and he wasn’t even there to bloody meet us! Ungrateful bugger! So Lani Si and I walked into Thamel for dinner, but both Si and I kept falling asleep at the table. Time to call it a day I think!
