What a day. We finally made it out of Kolkata after an arduous drive. The attractive and modern suspension bridge out of Kolkata contradicted the dereliction of the rest of the city. After three weeks in Kolkata was a most welcome sight. Driving in India is an exhaustive and dangerous undertaking. Neither car nor driver have an easy time of it. Rules are arbitrary, stupidity is everywhere and most people seem to have a casual disregard for their own well being. We covered quite a few kilometres but even on a Sunday, when the roads are at their quietest you are constantly slowing down to manoeuvre around trucks, buses, motorbikes, people, carts, bicycles and cows. There does not appear to be much of a system going on and it's very hard to get the measure of it.
The highway we eventually made it to was reasonably good. Split carriageway for most of it. Of course that doesn't stop people driving down it the wrong way occasional. Also there are enormous pot holes big enough to a fit a whole tyre from time to time and many smaller ones. Generally the road quality was quite good, unlike some of the suburban streets of Kolkata that looked like the surface of the moon.
We stopped at a road side restaurant and had dosa for lunch and a delicious dessert. The place was owned by a man who spoke fluent English and had lived in Dubai for 22 years. He told us plenty about Dubai and made us a nice coffee. It was a great lunch and it would have been nice to have been able to take the time and have a decent chat. Unfortunately because of the three weeks lost to customs in Kolkata that is a luxury we don't have.
A few hours later we had an incident with a scooter. A crash to be more precise. I had to swerve in an evasive manoeuvre to avoid hitting him but we still contacted with his handle bar and he and his wife came off. I was in the right lane (pot holes on left) of two on the dual carriage way. He was basically in the gravel on the left hand side of the road. He turned right, intending on a U-turn through a break in the island right in front of my nose whilst doing only a fraction of my speed. He did this without looking which is pretty typical in India. I saw him from the moment he started to turn and did the correct thing by local standards and hit the horn, presuming he would simply stop. He didn't change trajectory and just kept going in front of me. I went hard on the brakes and briefly locked up the fronts. He just kept going in spite of a loud horn and some screeching tyres in his right ear. I swerved hard to the right to try and avoid him as I had veered slightly to the right to make more room for him on the left. I swerved hard to the right whilst also looking what was coming the other way as I didn't want to get cleaned up by a truck. I didn't quite manage to miss him and hit his handle bar and off he came. No damage to the bike but he and his wife had a few scratches.
I stopped and a crowd came from god knows where, maybe twenty or thirty people, all standing around, most of them talking. I exchanged details but I was worried about our lack of insurance and delays in exiting the country, god knows how many months it could take to be allowed to leave the country with Indian bureaucracy. We tried to get insurance but predictably they insisted on an Indian registration for the vehicle. I had read, as was clear here, was that no matter what happens the Westerner is at fault in the eyes of the local and he was clearly implying that it was my fault. There was one nice bloke who spoke reasonable English with a soft voice and he seemed to be saying that we did not want to get the police involved and that was fine by me. During this time the thirty odd people had gathered around. As this is India the idea of personal space is not applicable and they stand as close as they physically can. Pushing up against you, hands constantly touching you, trying to guide you over here and there. At least half a dozen were trying to give me advice, often in Hindi, and making their suggestions clearer by out-yelling the person next to them. This was when I suggested I could pay some money as I had read from my research that it's quite common to just pay some money on the spot for smaller accidents. He asked for five thousand rupees(AUD$90). That's when everyone started shouting that was too much. It was nice of them not to just try and rip the foreigner off. The local people wanted justice and I admire that. I offered three ($55). He turned to his fellow countrymen and tried telling them (obvious from the charades) that he was badly hurt but they weren't buying it. The nice man who spoke English quietly suggested that I just give him three so I did and the scooter rider accepted that happily. We shook hands and everyone waved and gesticulated to indicate we could go now.
So we drove some more, covering ground quiet slowly because of the constant need to deal with obstacles. We had to drive the wrong way down a highway for a while ourselves as a truck had somehow managed to get beached on the island between the two halves of the highway. There was glass everywhere and badly smashed Armco fencing. It had clearly happened some time ago and they where just trying to get the truck off the island. The sun set and we had to drive at night. It's a dodgy area. The lonely planet says it has a deserved reputation for lawlessness. Most people who drive at night don't have any functioning tail lights. There are no street lights obviously. Some of the traffic has no headlights either. How they see I do not know. Everyone slows to about 30km/hr. Scooters with no lights just appear in front of you. The sacred cows are sometimes black and hitting one would be a disaster. Quite scary driving. We had to find a hotel at the next town.
Of course the hotelier knew we had to stop and that he was the only venue in town so he asked for 1200 Rupee. Probably four times what this place is worth. There was a family of eight in this room before us, we effectively kicked them out, maybe they weren't paying, relatives or something. A five minute clean of the room doesn't include pillow slips or cleaning the toilet or any such thing. There was something that you don't want to know about in the toilet because the flushing mechanism didn't work. Julian fixed it in a few seconds. Like most things in India it's laziness that makes the place what it is. This isn't a new hotel but the aluminium window still has it's protective covering on it which says so much about this place.
Now we are in a room with a mattress that we be considered hard if it was a chair. There is a TV on a paint spattered table that keeps turning itself on and off as the power comes and goes and sadly the fan goes with it. The open cavities to the outside world mean that my bright laptop screen that I am looking at as I type this is covered in flying bugs. I am concerned that my car will get stolen or at least broken in too. I guess we will get an early start however as I don't think we will be sleeping much so we will probably drive at first light. We are hoping to make Agra tomorrow but that might be wishful thinking.
It's been an incredible day on the long drive to Paris.