At night use dipper
I've recently learned a valuable lesson in driving a motorcycle across India. That lesson is: beware of trucking routes. The last two days I have found my way on to some roads that are heavily used by trucks which has been scarier than I would like to admit. Reckless might be the best way to describe truck drivers although it doesn't completely sum up how scary they drive. Most of the roads I've travelled so far I see a truck every 20km, but recently I have myself wedged in between group of up 20 trucks all stuck on single lane roads. The reall danger comes with how the truck (and bus drivers) handle attempt to drive. One way to describe what I'm talking about is to say that in the last 2 days I have seen 17 trucks on the sides of the road either having rolled over or been totaled in collisions with other trucks. The real danger becomes avoiding trucks that are driving very poorly, when the vehicles themselves are giant walls that can easily trap you in a situation you don't want to be in. I've made a commitment to stay away from these trucking areas at all costs, which just means moving slower on smaller roads. In the end, I'm glad to be on a motorcycle though, I really think its much safer than driving a car here.
I've started to notice a pattern. I have now, on 5 seperate occasions, in the last month had late night visitors to my hotel room. This has always happend at the seedier hotels I've stayed at and been annoying to say the least. Last night was one of the oddest of these situation, and thats saying something, because you may remember in earlier blog entries I talked about people barging into my room at all hours in some weird ways. Anways, I was at a small roadside hotel and had just nodded off. It was about midnight, and the doorbell rang for my hotel room. I waited a little bit to see if whoever it was would go away, but when it kept ringing I got up to see what was going on. When I openned the door I saw about 5 men standing at the door, one who I knew for sure was employed by the hotel. I was a little grumpy and so I asked what they needed and told them I really wanted to be sleeping. The man in the lead and closest to me was carrying a torch. It wasn't flamming, but it was definetly a torch and he was holding it as though it was illuminating the room. I felt a little bit like the villages had comes to kill the monster and burn down Dr. Frankenstiens castle. The torch bearing man informed me that he was a policeman, and that they needed to search my room. He then started to walk around me. Maybe it was that I was really tired, or that I'd just had enough of people waking me up at night but I stuck out my arm so he couldn't get by and I said if your a policeman where's your identification in a pretty gruff manner. He looked at me rather puzzled, and so I added verging on a snarl "if you don't prove to me your a policeman I'm not letting you into my room". At that point I think he understood me because we had a little bit of a staring contest which I think I was only able to succeed at because I was half asleep and actually staring at a really ugly hotel painting over his left shoulder. I expected him to either show me ID, or continue to push for me to let him in, but instead he gave up, gathered his mob, and left. I was too tired to be really shocked, so I locked the door and went back to sleep. In retrospect the situation turned out ok, but was more intense than I would have liked it to be. Hopefully I won't face anything like that in the future.
My motorcycle is taking a beating. I'm riding farther and through things I don't think it was made for. The speedometer no longer works, along with the odeometer, and the headlight. There are rattling noises coming from several places along with the obvios loose parts which are starting to wiggle like crazy, and an oil leak which started today. I will be taking it in to get serviced tommarow, hopefully that will go as smoothly as it has in the past.
Next stop is Pune to buy a plane ticket to Thialand and get some money from a US bank. "At night use dipper" is written on the back of 90% of the trucks in India along with a couple of other random things.
I've started to notice a pattern. I have now, on 5 seperate occasions, in the last month had late night visitors to my hotel room. This has always happend at the seedier hotels I've stayed at and been annoying to say the least. Last night was one of the oddest of these situation, and thats saying something, because you may remember in earlier blog entries I talked about people barging into my room at all hours in some weird ways. Anways, I was at a small roadside hotel and had just nodded off. It was about midnight, and the doorbell rang for my hotel room. I waited a little bit to see if whoever it was would go away, but when it kept ringing I got up to see what was going on. When I openned the door I saw about 5 men standing at the door, one who I knew for sure was employed by the hotel. I was a little grumpy and so I asked what they needed and told them I really wanted to be sleeping. The man in the lead and closest to me was carrying a torch. It wasn't flamming, but it was definetly a torch and he was holding it as though it was illuminating the room. I felt a little bit like the villages had comes to kill the monster and burn down Dr. Frankenstiens castle. The torch bearing man informed me that he was a policeman, and that they needed to search my room. He then started to walk around me. Maybe it was that I was really tired, or that I'd just had enough of people waking me up at night but I stuck out my arm so he couldn't get by and I said if your a policeman where's your identification in a pretty gruff manner. He looked at me rather puzzled, and so I added verging on a snarl "if you don't prove to me your a policeman I'm not letting you into my room". At that point I think he understood me because we had a little bit of a staring contest which I think I was only able to succeed at because I was half asleep and actually staring at a really ugly hotel painting over his left shoulder. I expected him to either show me ID, or continue to push for me to let him in, but instead he gave up, gathered his mob, and left. I was too tired to be really shocked, so I locked the door and went back to sleep. In retrospect the situation turned out ok, but was more intense than I would have liked it to be. Hopefully I won't face anything like that in the future.
My motorcycle is taking a beating. I'm riding farther and through things I don't think it was made for. The speedometer no longer works, along with the odeometer, and the headlight. There are rattling noises coming from several places along with the obvios loose parts which are starting to wiggle like crazy, and an oil leak which started today. I will be taking it in to get serviced tommarow, hopefully that will go as smoothly as it has in the past.
Next stop is Pune to buy a plane ticket to Thialand and get some money from a US bank. "At night use dipper" is written on the back of 90% of the trucks in India along with a couple of other random things.
posted by Robert at 11/12/2005 08:02:00 AM
1 Comments:
Hey Robert,
Noah here, just wanted to let you know that sara and I just got our tickets and we'll be in bangkok from the 22nd of december until the 1st of january. Hopefully we can all meet up. If so let me know if there's anything from "home" you want me to bring along.
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