White knuckle travel

At first glance this could be a picture of fairly orderly traffic. Two cars on the left, and a bus and a truck on the other side of the road, going the other way.

Alas no. This is India. It's actually a picture of us, and alongside us the truck which has just overtaken us. Coming the other way are a bus and a car, side by side. All four vehicles are about to come together in an almighty head-on crash!

At the last moment the truck swerves back to the left, and the oncoming car sees the light and ducks back in behind the bus. Crisis averted once more!

This sort of thing happens every minute or two on every drive on every Indian road! On this occasion it was made worse by the road being the nine-hairpin-bend stretch of road which drops 700m from the Western Ghats to the Malabar Coast. Wherever you are though, the best strategy is to just not look out the front. Let the driver do the driving (and the honking of the horn every few seconds). All you can do is quietly ponder your funeral arrangements.

The accident rate is indeed high. But it can't be as high as we'd expect it to be. We're still alive after all. The nominal road rules may be totally irrelevant, but there are conventions and patterns which presumably must be followed, about who wins and who loses the constant games of chicken.

Within the cities it's all played out at a slower pace, because there's traffic gridlock most of the time! Here are some views out the front in Bangalore, Trivandrum, and Nagercoil.