In India – Driving at Night

After spending the first couple of days in Hyderabad, Gopal and I left for the west coast. The trip is 700km long and over the roads we had to travel, he expected it to be about a 12 hour drive. Rather than drive by day, we decided to drive overnight. Gopal says it is a bit safer, because the roads are less crowded with motorbikes, bullock carts and autos at night.

We left our accommodation 6pm and after stopping to buy a car charger for my phone and to refuel, it was dark before we had really even left Hyderabad. Now, the first thing I want to say is that Gopal is an excellent driver. Pretty much everyone in India is a ‘better’ driver in some sense than everyone in New Zealand – just avoiding crashing requires a level of focus and attention far higher than is ever required in NZ. But Gopal is really very good and very experienced with this kind of long-distance, night-time driving. So the stories I’m about to tell aren’t about him, but just about how people drive in India.

The first thing is that you have to be on the lookout for animals. Wandering cows of course, lots of stray dogs, but also cats, goats and pigs might all wander onto the road and have to be avoided. There are no streetlights to help you see these things – your headlights are all you have.

The second issue is that as in the cities, the lane makers are largely decorative. Which means in a two-lane dual carriageway, drivers can and frequently do cross the centreline. It wasn’t at all uncommon for me to suddenly find myself facing a pair of headlights in our lane as an oncoming car or truck overtook. There’s really nothing you can do except flash your lights at them and trust that they will either complete their manoeuvre in time or will fall back in behind the vehicle they were trying to overtake just in time. Gopal really has balls of steel. Only a couple of times did he even slow down when it was clear the overtaking driver had been a little over-ambitious. Whereas I tried not to flinch every time it happened. Well, at least for the first few hours. It happens so frequently that even I got used to it and wasn’t bothered except when a driver cut things particularly close.

And the flip side of this is that Gopal also had to overtake things in the face of oncoming traffic. There are all kinds of things on Indian roads at night that need to be overtaken. Bullock carts are particularly slow, as are tractors, and both of these are often unlit. Many of the large trucks carrying bundles of sticks are particularly slow, as are the regular trucks and buses. And when I say slow, I mean some of these are travelling at 5, 10, 20 km/hr. If you didn’t overtake, it would take weeks to reach your destination. And if you waited until there was no oncoming traffic to overtake, it would take days. So you just do it whenever you can. You pull out, flash your lights so the vehicle you are overtaking knows, and so the oncoming traffic knows what you are doing and you go for it. If the oncoming vehicle is small, you can just overtake anyway, so that for a while there are essentially 3 lanes. If large, you might need to wait a little until you have a little bit of clear road to overtake. For someone brought up with NZ’s strict rules about overtaking, it’s hard to adjust to, but after a few hours, I wasn’t even particularly bothered by it anymore.

Indian roads are not very well signposted. Most major turn offs had a sign somewhere nearby, but by no means all. I was using google maps on my phone to figure out routes, and we supplemented that with Gopal stopping every now and then at truck stops to ask about the road conditions. We stopped for a midnight roadside snack, and then Gopal let me get a little bit of sleep for half an hour or so before we traversed a big city. Google maps navigation was very handy for these situations.

We managed to stay on course all night except once. We never saw the fork, but after a while I noticed that our GPS location was off our intended course. I got Google to re-route us and it gave us a small road to follow to get back to the main highway. But we couldn’t find it. It just didn’t seem to exist, so we took an even smaller road that seems to run mainly parallel to it. Pretty soon the road condition deteriorated until we were on a very bumpy dirt road. Gopal showed that he’d missed his true calling as a rally driver by constantly finding the best route with the least bumps.

I was getting a bit worried about where Google was leading us, but we eventually emerged onto a slightly more decent road. A minute or two later, we drove through a village that had some kind of festival or celebration going on. There were dozens of people gathered under an awning decorated with coloured lights, and a couple of people on stage with a microphone giving a speech. One woman in a sari was prostrating herself on the road as we approached. This was around 3:30am. Since it seemed to be open, stopped and had a quick drink just next door before continuing on. We eventually got back to the road that Google maps had originally planned for us (it looked like the first segment was closed for repairs) and assumed we would shortly be back on main roads. But not quite so fast. We had a few more segments of badly repaired and dirt roads before eventually hitting another village where we were supposed to cross a bridge to get back to the main roads. We followed Google’s directions diligently, and ended up on the bridge approach only to find it closed and occupied by a sleeping man. We backtracked and drove around a bit trying to figure out how to get across the river. Sometimes we would see a truck and then try to turn around and follow it, reasoning that it must have come from somewhere. Eventually we stopped next to the bridge, but couldn’t figure out how to get onto it. After a few minutes, we saw a light coming across the bridge, and by watching where the motorcycle appeared, we finally found the bridge approach. It was right next to us but had just looked like a nondescript opening into a small lot. Finally we were on our way again.

Around 5am we ended up on roads where Gopal got to employ his rally driving skills. Eventually, after about 12 hours, it was almost daylight and I really needed to pee. We stopped at the next village, and found this place, where I got to use a squat toilet for the first time.

We got a little bit more fuel and then were on our way. By then the sun was up, so we got a beautiful view as we descended a gorgeous bit of winding road down the mountains.

Our next priority was getting some food. We stopped for a delicious breakfast here:

I’ll post about food a bit later. We eventually reached our destination about 10am, after a 16 hour drive, and after about 24 hours without sleep.