Let me briefly explain driving in India, from the POV of a Westerner: it’s insane. There is, apparently, one rule on the road: big things win over small things. We are a small thing; our only boast being that we can mildly irritate cyclists.
Not to put too finer point on it; it’s dangerous. You will often see a large truck heading towards you in your lane, and see the driver think “shall i pull in… no… i’ll just run over it”, forcing you to swerve into the dirt on the side of the road. Assuming of course, no other vehicles have already colonised that much coveted space. Truly, it is a case of adapt or die - very quickly we had to develop an intuitive traffic-twitch to avoid the near constant invite for disaster.
With this in mind, and the sage advise to not rag the engine, we hurtled toward the border with the throttle at full power. And because things started to almost appear manageable, we elected to push on into the night. Night driving is like day driving; only without the benefit of being able to distinguish what is coming toward you. Fortunately for India’s economy, if not for us, other drivers have no issue with this and continue at their usual pace and style (incase it hasn’t sunk in yet, that’s “fast” and “reckless”).
As the second day dawned, and calmed by our rest, we once again felt the trepidation for the madness that awaited us. Fortunately, this melted away within seconds of gripping the handle bars; and we pootled on alone. After the morning to ourselves, we were caught by other teams and all hell broke loose. Tuktuks became all terrain vehicles, any gap - even if it meant going sideways - became fair game. We were no longer reacting to traffic chaos, we were causing it. Truly, the tuktuks could take some punishment: pot holes at 50, mud, water, speed bumps - you name; they handled it.
Two events in particular stood out.
The first was our ‘attack’, and the second my being kicked by a corpse…
As we crossed a bridge that explicitly said ‘max speed 20kph, no over taking’ - doing 60kph in oncoming traffic - we were rushed by a very angry, heavily armed security guard who also had an 8ft bamboo pole, that he repeatedly swung at our rickshaw, and from the whites of his eyes, presumably he dreamed of doing the same at us. Only humble (ok, profuse) apologies got us back on the road in one piece.
In the afternoon, we came upon a heavily blocked road caused by a head on collision between two trucks. Keen to continue apace, I walked into the mob to look for a route through. Here I discovered that there were two fatalities; and the crowd was growing. No one spoke out against us, but they directly advised us to turn back. Much to my consternation, a fellow rickshaw pulled up with a video camera, and my awareness of mob mentality heightened. Having found a small gap, I opted to rapidly return to the safety of the rickshaw. Only with my back turned, I felt a tap from behind, and looked back to see 4 men carrying a corpse, using its feet to clear a path - a path I was very clearly in!
Travelling in convoy, we creeped through the parting crowd and squeezed between the recoiled trucks; pausing briefly for another rickshaw to play ambulance to an injured man, carrying him to the nearest town.
After covering 450km in one long day, we arrived in the border town of Siligiri, where we fought our way into a hotel room that was being occupied - in the military sense of the word - by a large, disgruntled cockroach.