Continental Hotspot

Back in 2012 I and five other high school students from the Netherlands won a prize by Utrecht University to go to India to attend the TERI YUVA-meet conference as well as do some touristy stuff for a couple of days. After several days meeting all kinds of people from across India and talking about climate change and solutions for sustainable development it was time to go sightseeing. The big ticket item everyone had been looking forward to was our day trip to Agra to see the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal.

We’d actually arrived in Agra late in the evening the day before and we were off the an early start. The day itself was amazing and we were all seriously impressed by all the beauty in Agra. But unfortunately the time came to go back to New Delhi so we crammed ourselves back in the rickety little van to get on the “highway”. We’d go for lunch at one of the few clean places along the road: the McDonalds at Mathura!

Now I say we got on the highway but I do mean that very generously. That’s what people called it but really it wasn’t more than two unmarked strips of cracked asphalt barely wide enough to overtake cars or the occasional mule buggy. The road wasn’t graded with over and underpasses nor were there any on or off ramps. The divider in the middle of the road had breaks in it periodically and traffic needing to get to the other side of the highway would wait for the traffic to quiet down and then cross quickly. On multiple occasions on the day before our driver had to break hard because some slow moving cart had crossed the highway and was directly in our lane.

Since in India the traffic drives on the left and we were going north we were on the wrong side of the highway to get to the McDonalds at Mathura. Now you would expect in this case to drive past your destination, turn around at one of the breaks in the divider and backtrack a bit with the flow of the traffic to safely get to the McDonalds. Our driver had very different ideas. After all that would mean spending unnecessary fuel going north and south again. No, what he did was cross the divider and simply drive on the wrong side of the highway for what felt like an eternity.

Almost immediately after heading straight into traffic we encountered issues. Our driver was constantly honking to warn the oncoming traffic of our approach. Motor cycles were swerving out of our way. We were driving very slowly, maybe 20 or 30 km/h but the oncoming traffic was doing anywhere between 80 and a 100 km/h in the opposite direction. None of this was safe in any way. If we collided the tin bucket we were in provided no protection whatsoever. We didn’t even have seatbelts.

We panicked, even the Dutch adults looked scared as hell. This clearly wasn’t the plan. The driver hadn’t discussed this stunt with the adults supervising our trip. We shouted at the guy but he stoically said something in Hindi that none of us understood and kept on going.

Not more than a hundred meters in front of us we saw our doom heading straight for us. A truck completely overladen with bales of hay was overtaking a cart at something like 80 kilometers per hour. Hay was piled high on this monstrosity and hanging from the sides making it almost twice as wide as the actual truck itself.

Our driver began to honk furiously and flashed his lights muttering something under his breath. He slowed down until we were going at a crawl space but the truck was still barreling towards us. It is a miracle the driver in the truck opposite us could see anything through the bales of hay but finally he slammed on the breaks and swerved out of our way narrowly overtaking the cart which had to come to a stop to let us and the truck pass.

Thankfully a little while later we saw the McDonalds sign looming in the distance to our right and we were finally there. As we were sitting there, shaken, in the smog obscured sun with our kick’n chick’n burgers (no cow meat in India obviously) we looked at each other and laughed like “Well we’re in India what did we expect?”

Once we had finished our food we decided to place our fates in the hands of our driver once again for the remainder of the drive to New Delhi. He was the only one who knew the way and none of us fancied sitting in the acrid smoke of the nearby refinery that was putting black goop up our noses any moment longer than we had to. I think our supervisors had probably had a talk with the guy in the meantime because this time he went with the flow of the traffic and backtracked along the right side of the road until a break in the divider before heading north again to New Delhi.

It was all well worth it though because the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal in Agra were absolutely stunning to see!

As I was looking up the place this happened on Google Earth to write this story I noticed that the “highway” in question has been turned into a nice actual three-lane highway with overpasses and ramps around the year 2019. No more wrong-way driving on this stretch of road!