Picpost

Thursday

I fall asleep, half-drunk and half-packed, on half my bed.

Friday

I wake earlier than I’d hoped: 4:40 or so. But by the time I’m packed, bathed, and have chosen music CDs for the trip, it’s 6:30. I’m half an hour behind schedule. Or rather, I’m half an hour ahead of schedule, because who among us doesn’t leave an hour later than planned, always?

I start the engine and let it warm up, ticking over idly, as I clean the wing mirrors and affix my replacement blind-spot mirrors on them. These ones aren’t as nice as the first pair. Still, can’t be helped.

My newly-acquired handheld digital tyre pressure gauge  shows me that I’ve miscalculated my judgments the previous day, and the cold tyre pressures are a little low for highway travel. I fill the petrol tank at the IndianOil near Mall Apartments, but have to make a detour to the Bharat Petroleum at Malka Ganj to refill air, because the gauge at the IndianOil is analogue, and I don’t trust them.

By 7:00, I’m on my way towards Mathura Road. I hit the Delhi-Haryana border at Badarpur at 7:45. 15 minutes later I’ve cleared Faridabad, and by 8:15 the road is finally starting to look like something approximating a National Highway of the stature a Golden Quadrilateral leg (Delhi-Calcutta, going east) deserves.

Mathura comes up in due course, and Agra comes along in a little over 3 hours. No complaints with the road after Mathura: as top-class as an Indian highway can get, except perhaps that cats-eyes along the lane and median markings would be very useful at night.

The usual complaints with Indian highways crop up: camels, cows, goats, and water buffalo taking right-of-way; motorcyclists deciding to overtake an autorickshaw (wtf is an auto doing on a highway in the first place?) just as you come thundering along in the right lane; motorcycles entering the highway through a gap in the median and trusting in you to avoid hitting them (why the fuck do our highways go through villages?? Can’t they go around them?); village women stepping onto the highway from between median vegetation and then looking left, instead of looking before stepping; people crossing the highway at will (at one point a legless beggar crawled his way across); lorries, cars, motorbikes, and bicycles coming at you from the opposite direction– in the fast lane, always in the fast lane; and most of all– lorries driving with one set of wheels over the lane marking, reducing your passing space by a foot, making it very dangerous at 100+ kph speeds. I follow my usual highway style: lean on the horn and make your way through, or keep leaning on the horn until there’s space for you to make your way through. The side-effect is a huge annoyance, though: there are few things more frustrating than looking in your mirror and seeing a truck pull fully back into the left lane, after you’ve squeeezed through with curses that would turn Shaitan’s tongue black. Still, these obstacles help keep you alert and awake: I can’t imagine how boring it must be driving on a developed country’s highway in an automatic transmission with cruise control. (What’s left for the driver to do? Steer?)

The Agra-Kanpur stretch of highway is both truly fantastic and quite empty of traffic, and I make good time, with a stop for fuel 80 km before Kanpur, a 10-minute pause for a phone call about a refrigerator, and a lunch break 10 km later. I munch salami slices inside folded bread slices, chug a Tuborg (just one small beer); take a piss on a tree in front of two village boys, take a couple of photos, and am back on the road in twenty minutes. Kanpur has a beauty of an elevated bypass that takes half an hour to traverse, so no loss of speed there. The Allahabad Air Force base comes up 10 hours after I begin driving, but it takes me another hour to make my way through that ultracongested mess they call A’bad city and up to the leprosy mission hospital on the banks of the Yamuna where I’ve been camped out since.

A fun day for me. Instructive too, in that I learn my reaction to extended solo driving (much less stressful/tiring than I’d anticipated), and the car’s reaction to the same (no problems whatsoever, and it goes faster than the Qualis at home).

Driving solo I couldn’t take too many pictures, but I did manage a few when the highway was particularly empty. Have a dekko. All pics are thumbnails.

Just after Faridabad

Nice trees, but note the tractor coming the wrong way

Another jackass tractor. That bug died on my windshield about a minute into the journey. V annoying

The Taj Mahal

En route Kentucky

Morons

That's more like it

Close to top speed

Lunch break

Fucking useless GPS

Back to Dilli tomorrow.