Driving Indian Style . . . .

We learned that the horn is basically your blinker here in India. It lets the vehicle in front of you know that you are passing on the right or the left, or that you are coming up behind them, and you need them to move. All of the big trucks here have the words “Horn Please” painted on their back doors! Another rule of thumb is whoever has their nose in front gets the right of way. Lines on the road are to be used for guidance down the road, so people will drive straddling them, rather than between them like we are used to. Blinkers have more than one meaning, they can be used to indicate that you want to turn right or left or that you are changing lanes, but they can also be used to tell the car behind you that they can go around you on the right or the left! So when you put your blinker on, you have to double check that someone isn’t going to try to go around you just when you are moving over. In the US and most other places, you only have worry about vehicles on the road. Here, you have to be aware of vehicles of all sizes from bikes, to motorcycles, to cars, to SUV’s, to buses, to big trucks. But also, there are people walking, bicycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, and of course cows and dogs! To hit a cow is a jailable offence! That’s right, if you hit a cow on the road and kill it, you could go to jail for two years! So there you have it, a short introduction to driving in India. After we had been in Gurgaon for a couple of days, we decided to brave the bicycle rickshaws. These are basically rudimentary taxis that will take you from place to place for a fee. We got to where we were going without any harm, and we were headed back, and I noticed that we were headed the wrong direction. Both Nick and I were on the same rickshaw and the guy was smaller than me that was pedaling. When we told him that we needed to go the other direction, he proceeded to turn to go across four lanes of speeding traffic in order to get to the other side of the road. Nick got off and helped him push the bike across traffic. Then he started going the right way and all was fine until he got to a round about and rather than go around and continue on the right side of the road, he cut across oncoming traffic again, and continued up the road against traffic!!! Thank goodness there is a God in heaven looking down on us! Needless to say, we haven’t ridden a rickshaw since.