Palolem Beach - Calangute – Panaji - Madgao
The Vehicle-Spotter's Guide to India
By the time we left Goa we had cycled 2,000-odd kilometres,
caught two trains, a few buses and enough rickshaws to build a real car. Here's what we learnt about the happy
chaos of Indian transport in the process.
Trains
Trains
India Rail knows it keeps India running and will delay your service until you notice too. Each day almost as many people as live in Australia travel on trains that are cheap, more crowded than any bazaar and -- if the cautionary illustrations are to be believed -- rife with prancing villians who enjoy nothing more than injecting your unguarded food with drugs.
Trains are also the most pleasant way to see India; rolling
from here to there while safe from most of India's sharp edges, lulled
by changing vistas and the old-world clattering of steel-on-steel.
Buses are driven according to a heirachy of size which holds that the applicability of law is inversly proportional to gross tonnage. Buses travel where the trains don't, renew growth below preciptious hairpins, keep chiropractors busy and test the reflexes of daydreaming cyclists. They're cheap, but so are backyard tattooists.
Trucks give aspiring painters somewhere to practise colourful murals before graduating to costly canvas. Drivers are unfailingly friendly and don't seem half as worried about their absent doors as they are with out-contributing the Thugees.
Cars are a status symbol that allow India’s elite to sit in traffic and show passing motorists how good life is when you’re rich enough to shirk appointments.
Rickshaws
Rickshaws are taxis for people who think that three wheels are 75% as good as four. Slower than a car, usually fitted with a novelty horn and ugly by anyone’s standards, rickshaws are nonetheless space-concious enough to roll on a dime. If vehicles were crimes, the rickshaw would be murder-suicide.
Each motorbike is a testament to what can be achieved when people are slim, numerous and unhassled by traffic regulations. Some are substitutes for family cars, some mobile livestock pens; all are driven to ensure that no patch of Indian road is denied the chance of a crash.
Bicycles bookend the crushable end of the size-as-right vehicle heirachy. As a cheap access point to the exhaust-shrouded bedlam of Indian roads, bicycles are perfect for those too simple to work an ignition, Australians prone to fast generalising and coalminers who miss black lung.
The sugar-cane tricycle, the dray with car wheels, the homemade sidecar – India is a menagerie of wheeled contraptions that mostly qualify as vehicles because they’re found on the roads.
Some days, these ad-hoc, jerry-rigged and shouldn’t-quite-work creations look like the finest triumph of DIY ingenuity. Other-times they look like the fissures of a system itself held together by twisted wire, tenacity and hope.
Either way, they’re vehicles, part of the traffic that is best understood by remembering that many drivers believe there’s a pantheon at their back and follow only one rule: do what you want, but do it with panache and high spirits.
Buses
Buses are driven according to a heirachy of size which holds that the applicability of law is inversly proportional to gross tonnage. Buses travel where the trains don't, renew growth below preciptious hairpins, keep chiropractors busy and test the reflexes of daydreaming cyclists. They're cheap, but so are backyard tattooists.
Trucks
Trucks give aspiring painters somewhere to practise colourful murals before graduating to costly canvas. Drivers are unfailingly friendly and don't seem half as worried about their absent doors as they are with out-contributing the Thugees.
Cars
Cars are a status symbol that allow India’s elite to sit in traffic and show passing motorists how good life is when you’re rich enough to shirk appointments.
Rickshaws
Rickshaws are taxis for people who think that three wheels are 75% as good as four. Slower than a car, usually fitted with a novelty horn and ugly by anyone’s standards, rickshaws are nonetheless space-concious enough to roll on a dime. If vehicles were crimes, the rickshaw would be murder-suicide.
Motorbikes
Each motorbike is a testament to what can be achieved when people are slim, numerous and unhassled by traffic regulations. Some are substitutes for family cars, some mobile livestock pens; all are driven to ensure that no patch of Indian road is denied the chance of a crash.
Bicycles
Bicycles bookend the crushable end of the size-as-right vehicle heirachy. As a cheap access point to the exhaust-shrouded bedlam of Indian roads, bicycles are perfect for those too simple to work an ignition, Australians prone to fast generalising and coalminers who miss black lung.
The Rest
The sugar-cane tricycle, the dray with car wheels, the homemade sidecar – India is a menagerie of wheeled contraptions that mostly qualify as vehicles because they’re found on the roads.
Some days, these ad-hoc, jerry-rigged and shouldn’t-quite-work creations look like the finest triumph of DIY ingenuity. Other-times they look like the fissures of a system itself held together by twisted wire, tenacity and hope.
Either way, they’re vehicles, part of the traffic that is best understood by remembering that many drivers believe there’s a pantheon at their back and follow only one rule: do what you want, but do it with panache and high spirits.
:) ...lol ... even tho I know you are actually serious!
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