As things are wont to be, just when I’ve decided to update more often, I have a busy week at work. My apologies… and now for the continuing epic…

Goa was about 500 miles away, which, in States time is about 6 to 7 hours of driving, or about half that if you’re my father. Because of this, we planned on a short detour to some Mosque ruins, and then a direct drive to Goa. Leaving around 6:30 am that day, it seemed we’d be in Goa in time for a late dinner.

Driving out of Hyderabad was incredibly slow. Traffic in the outer areas of the city was fairly intense, even early in the morning. As soon as you’re even a little out of the city, you can sense an immediate change: the level of poverty was far greater just a short distance away, the tall buildings completely disappearing and being replaced by huts and shacks of varying construction materials. The poor road conditions and many vehicles kept us for a couple of hours before we started to get a good speed going.

As I stated before, the rules of the Indian road change completely going from the city to the highway. Though the highway is one lane in either direction, it is in effect 5 lanes. You have the far side of the road, the middle part of each lane, and a center shared between the two. Typically you’ll stay as far to the left as possible. (In India, you drive in the left hand lane).

The trick is the size of the vehicle. You’ll basically have three sizes of vehicles on the road: very large TATA buses, small TATA cars, or tiny rickshaws or motorcycles. (The rickshaws were often crammed full of people. That did not look like a comfortable way to travel.) The large buses and trucks will take up at least two of these lanes, sometimes more. The cars take around one to one and a half. The smallest vehicles take up a bit less than one of these imaginary lanes.

Your position on this road will be dictated by how much you really want to pass the vehicle in front of you, versus how willing you are to get within inches of that oncoming monster bus. If you want to veer into the furthest right lane of the road in order to pass that passenger car that’s passing a bus, so be it.

Allow me to illustrate.

Stay on target.

There’s little room for manoeuvring in this situation. But I wouldn’t have been shocked if some daring motorcyclist tried to squeeze between the two. Such are the road rules of a nation that largely believes in reincarnation.

The lumbering behemoth buses were probably amongst the most daring vehicles. Buses won’t stop for pedestrians blocking the road in India. They’ll just honk louder. (Honks are a never ending sound on India’s roads.) And buses won’t hesitate to pass other buses, even though it often takes up slightly more space than the road has. They don’t care, and I’m not completely surprised. I’d imagine driving one of those festive road machines lends a certain sense of invincibility. They’re the largest vehicles on the road. They’re in a freaking bus.

I counted at least two bright and colourful buses, flipped completely upside down into a ditch on the side of the road, apparently long abandoned.

Complicating the matter is the interesting pedestrian traffic, which includes people, oxen-driven carts, and flocks of various animals. We would have to stop every so often for cattle either crossing the lanes, or just ambling about with carefree whimsy on the road (ah, to be a Hindu cow). Shepherds were often walking a number of animals down the side of the roads, requiring everyone to slow down a little, and sometimes stopped traffic altogether to cross.

Between the frequent slowing down and speeding up to pass vehicles, the herds of animals, and the occasional transformation from paved road to dirt path, we were beginning to realise that our California estimates of travel time were way off the mark.

You’ll have to stop in various cities along the way while travelling the road in India as well. It can be a complicated affair… sometimes signs are hard to find, and not always that useful anyway because of the many different languages in India. Hindi is supposed to be a standard unifying language, but one state we travelled through, Maharashtra, had refused to put up signs in Hindi. Apparently this was partly out of fear that their local tongues would die out, and partly just pure, good old fashioned linguistic snobbery- they thought their language was better. As it would probably be impossible for the company’s drivers to have memorised every road in every city the passengers may have the whim of visiting, the driver basically makes his way through the cities by travelling straight down roads, stopping at any fork or intersection, and asking people on the side of the road which direction to go in order to reach whatever your next stop is. From this, I learned my only Hindi… ‘Sida, sida,’ meaning, ‘Straight, straight,’ accompanied by nods down the general direction of the road.

A final joy of Indian road travel we found had to do with state to state taxation of commercial vehicles. The vehicle we were in was registered to Andhra Pradesh, and being a commercial vehicle, we had to pay a state tax at each border. This didn’t amount to much- usually less than 200 Rs, about $4- but it was another stop to make. Also, we were frequently pulled over by police officers checking our paperwork, making sure it was all in order, and asking for a bribe for good measure. (Except in Karnataka. You freaking rule, Karnataka.)

Goa, at last. Goa was colonised by the Portuguese, leading to a strong presence of Catholic influences, including architecture.

When all was said and done, we spent about 24 hours total on the road to make it to Goa. Not in one sitting, of course… we stopped in a city called Kohlapur for a night, and finally entered Goa around noon the next day, and reached the area we were staying late in afternoon. The road trip was long, but had several advantages in the end. We saw tons of different scenery in India… it went from dusty areas around Hyderabad to grassy plains in the middle of the country, to lush tropical vegetation on the West coast of India. Seeing the random sites on the road was interesting as well… a lot of small towns on the way, as well as a variety of wildlife (including monkeys and wild peacocks).

Our stay in Goa would be interesting but incredibly brief, which will be described next time. Following that, we would travel to Bijapur (talked about in a previous entry where I was assaulted by mobs of excited children) and then back to Hyderabad. All in all, it wasn’t a bad view of South India.

I mentioned that we stopped at the ruins of a mosque. Here’s a couple of pictures.