Road Trip.

November was a hectic month, mainly because I had the distinct pleasure of sharing my life in South Asia with four family members, including an aunt, two cousins, and my mom for the first two weeks. Their time here deserves multiple blog posts, but you will need to ask them for the stories. Anything you think South Asia could throw at you was thrown at my family members during their stay.

One day during her stay, my mom and I needed to separate from the group, leaving a beautiful mountainous area to drive into rural South Asia to meet my coworkers for a Family Retreat. The place we left my aunt and cousins is pictured below:

According to Google Maps, the estimated travel time for my mom and I was 3.5 hours.

A basic premise of Sociology is that the “map is not the territory” meaning that it is ultimately impossible to capture the full reality of a moment in words or pictures, or by any other means. In our situation, the Google Maps travel estimate was definitely not a reflection of reality. We spent almost 10 hours on the road that day. Here are some of the reasons why:

Single lane roads in rural India mean that every time you encounter a large track (which is often) your driver is required to play chicken with oncoming traffic in order to pass them. The owner of this particular truck is aware of this phenomenon and has painted the phrase “Blow Horn” on his rear. At least he will have warning.

 Sometimes big trucks ARE your oncoming traffic. And they always win chicken.

Our driver is one of the many drivers on South Asian roads who suffers from perpetual lethargy brought on by 24-hour work shifts. In order to keep him awake, we needed to periodically stop for chai breaks at roadside rest stops. What else would you do to pass the time at a rest stop other than impersonate the local idols?

 You find yourself playing “Where’s Waldo?” while driving carefully around trucks heavily-laden with furniture, bags, and people. It can be distracting.

This picture was taken at another chai pit stop for the sake of the driver.

Driving in South Asia requires you to share the road with multiple kinds of vehicular and ambulatory things (as discussed in my earlier post on traffic), including the auto rickshaw. It definitely runs faster than its human and bike-pulled counterparts, but it is another vehicle to avoid on the road.

If you can discern through the blurred photo, you will see a cycle rickshaw pulling two people. Drivers of cycle rickshaws have an amazing ability to wind into the crevices of traffic, but their human effort is no matched for impatient vehicles at a young green light. They often set off a lot of impatient honking when the light changes.

It seems that people here can ride everything sidesaddle except horses (they really struggle with horses for some reason). Look at the grace of this man on his friend’s bike.

This picture says a lot, but I think it is best captured in the following haiku:

Overstuffed autos

drifting in lanes, ignoring

cell phone usage laws.

For some reason, this guy was the icing for me. He is riding on a cart pulled by a bull, without a care in the world. The man, not the bull. Or at least that’s what his stance says to me.

With nine hours of stressful, chai-filled driving under his belt, our driver was very reluctant to venture out of the towns and into the real “inside” of South Asian rural countryside in order to get me and my mom safely to the retreat center, especially since the sun had set. We found ourselves driving along a narrow road bordered by tall grasses on either side. Apparently the area where we were driving is famous for bandits, and our driver was not thrilled about carrying us in his vehicle with so little visibility. We emerged from the slender road onto a dirt road, cutting through a village. Using my non-existent sense of direction and vague directional hand gestures from villagers, my mom, our driver, and I found ourselves on the final road leading through an orchard to the relief of the retreat. Relief, right?

Wrong. Earlier in the week, the retreat center decided to begin road “improvements” to their entry road, but they had only gotten so far as moving dirt to the road, which meant that the road we needed to travel was covered in large mounds of soil; completely and totally impassable according to our now-panicked and vehement driver.

With repeated mutterings about “criminals”, our driver turned on the overhead light, got out of the taxi, and walked into the darkness of the night with other villagers, leaving me and my mom alone and highlighted, in the middle of nowhere, rural, “criminal-infested” South Asia. I slid down in my seat, looking over at my mom with bewilderment. Moments later, she turned to gaze out into the blackness and I saw her neck freeze. Very slowly, my mom turned back to me and, with a wide-eyed straight face, muttered, “Alice, there’s a man standing outside our taxi with a rifle”. We hadn’t realized it, but our taxi driver had gotten out of his car to consult with villagers and other retreat center employees, including a plain clothes guard. At this point the absurdity of our situation hit home and both of us had to stifle a stress laugh.

Within minutes, our harried driver returned with even more retreat center staff, including a man on a motor bike. I noticed a patch bearing the retreat center name on the mismatched front pockets of a few of the men, so I figured that we were relatively safe. We were directed to leave our bags (which we instead draped all over ourselves, save one) and take the bike through the dirt piles, into the retreat center. I carry a basic Nokia cell phone (which we all know is the ultimate life-saving weapon) which I was using to contact the retreat staff, so I directed my mom to take the first ride into the retreat center, assuring her that I was fine because “I have a phone”. My mom had not noticed the [un]official retreat center patches, so when she was directed to get on the bike, she tells me that she thought a) that she might never see her big luggage bag again, and that b) she might never see her daughter again. In that order.

I watched my mom ride off into the darkness and found myself alone, with a stressed-out driver, an old man with a big gun, and a crowd of curious villagers, none of whom I could actually see because it was so dark. The driver ordered me to call the retreat center and tell them he would borrow the guard to get him safely back t o a main road, so I attempted to call the center. After nine uncompleted calls, I told the busy signal (and everyone within earshot) exactly what I thought about their phone service and hung up. In the time it took me to pay the driver without revealing my money to the suspected hordes of on-looking criminals hiding out in the bushes, the retreat biker was back, minus my mom. I hobbled onto the back of his bike with my luggage and he drove me along a bumpy road, through an orchard, and into the bright, warm, safe light of the retreat center, where we met my mom at the entrance.

After throwing our bags in a cabin, my mom and I followed the sounds of “Amazing Grace” floating through the air, directly to a campfire surrounded by my IJM family. The significance of the lyrics, “I once was lost but now am found” was not at all lost on us.

That night, mom and I retired to our cabin and let our nervous energy loose with 15 solid minutes of side-splitting laughter after promising each other that we would not “tell Dad” until my mom got home.

There are many prudent lessons to be learned from this story. Lessons about preparation and having a map and patience. Those lessons will continue to sink in, but for now, I marvel in my mom’s ability to take it all in stride.