The Delights of Navigating in India

What you could do, if you have some navigational skills and it makes you feel better, is buy your own map, throw it into your bag.  You might as well wait until you get home to read it for all the practical good it will do you.  Your driver may well prefer to ask about half a dozen different, random people directions to your next town or hotel.  There answers will most likely be quite contradictory.  The secret is to hope that he doesn’t ask too many people directions, not unless you’re doing some kind of survey of opinions.  We arrived in Udaipur in the dark, which in February falls like a heavy shutter a few minutes after sunset.  Our driver didn’t know the city all that well and asked about ten people the way to the Amet Haveli, a beautiful hotel and restaurant on the edge of Lake Pichola – the setting of James Bond’s Octopussy.  Now you and I might ask a taxi driver, a hotel receptionist or a police officer.  Our driver preferred to ask: a cobbler, a shopkeeper selling crisps and other snacks, someone who happened to be leaning on our car, a young girl passing by, a boy trundling by on a bicycle and two men who obviously threw themselves in mud for a living.

Surviving India

Do they drive on the left or right in India?

That’s a very good question.

There are rough roads between villages.  In some places, such as Churu near Alsisar, you’ll find lots of mud and materials for road-building.  But still the tuk-tuks are highly decorated, as if they’ve escaped from some fairground ride.

Sometimes, time and space plays tricks on your understanding of certainties.  You might see a sign saying that it’s 190 km to Bikaner, travel 20 km only to come across another sign that suggests that it’s now 200km to Bikaner.

The smaller roads, as well as some of the bigger roads, have deep pot holes.  You’d think that would be enough to slow down drivers, but no.  Let’s have a few traffic calming measures, road bumps – in the UK, they are called sleeping policemen.

Weaving is not only a cottage industry.  It's also a style of driving.