Beyond Selidor

I love trains too and seek them out when I can. Been on a a few steam trains, though they are largely either loops our short tourist tracks. But I think my most memorable journey was a car ride. I was taking a brief jaunt through northern India to see the major Buddhist landmarks. I don't even remember which leg of the trip this was, but we set out in the early evening and it took us a few hours to reach our destination.

Indian traffic is kind of notorious. All laws are suggestions and things like lanes don't really exist. You honk constantly as a form of echolocation and a polite "I'm passing now" so it's very noisy. But that was relatively easy to get used to, and because the roads are bad no one is going particularly fast anyway. When it got crazy was when we got out of the city. We were driving through a dense fog. You could only see maybe ten feet ahead and the cars in front were practically shadows. The road was a two lane road, but everyone drove right down the center of it, which initially scared the bejezus out of me because we were constantly swerving to the right to avoid head on collisions. But we had to do this, because even in the middle of the country the sides of the road were full of people walking down the street, and there were no shoulders or pedestrian walkways, so driving in your lane would mean constantly running the risk of clipping a person or a cart or something. So here we are, speeding along at what felt like much faster clip than it probably was, in rapidly increasing darkness, in a fog that would put Silent Hill to shame, as random ass people and cars just popped up in front of us and our driver swerved around them with one hand on the wheel and the other in a tin of tobacco or betel or something like that.

I'm usually good at catching a nap in the jaunts between locations when traveling but I was white knuckled the entire drive.

One of the top items in my bucket list is to take the Orient Express from start to finish, but it will be some long while before that's possible, I feel.