Distance is Relative

You don't appreciate how good highways are back home until you've been to India.

In Canada, if the sign says 300km to your destination, you know you've got a 3ish hour trip ahead of you. Maybe less, no more.

Here, with narrow roads, lax traffic laws, and people/pedestrians who constantly run across the road, 300km can = 6+ hours of travel. It's seriously like a game of frogger here, and my respect for our driver has doubled after seeing what he has to put up with on the road.

Still, you'll never appreciate how long those last 10km of a trip can be til youve been down an Indian highway.

They say time is relative, but spend some of it here and you may start to disagree...

Asteroids in Real Life

The inside of an auto-richshaw. Takes notes: You'll be using these a lot!

I have officially arrived in the land of Curry and ... Uh, more Curry. And after the worse luck with my first flight, actually wound up arriving 30 mins early for my Mumbai flight.

Not a lot to report right now, I'm still pretty knocked out from last night, and because I can't sleep on moving vehicles = still going on 3 hours of sleep from yesterday.

So I'm pretty knackered right now.

But, that said, I did have my first Indian experience tonight: riding in a car! I've always heard how dangerous it is to drive in India, and 've seen all the amazing race/ travel shows that give you proof that it's not a wise thing to do. Brother, TVs got nothing on the real thing!

Remember the game Asteroids that used to be in every arcade in the 80s? For any of you who can't recall, in Asteroids you are the pilot of a small rocket ship as you try to find your way out of an asteroid storm. You can shoot the rocks to make them smaller, but the end result is the same: there's a shit ton of stuff constantly moving towards you...see where I'm going with this?

Just change the ship to taxi and the rocks to others cars and it's like you're in India!

It's absolutely crazy! I thought Vietnam was bad, but these guys actually SPEED UP when something's in front of them! At first I found it kind of quaint - a little queerity that belonged to India, but when we almost hit a woman and tried to run down a kid on a bike (to be fair he wasn't yielding), I got that "so this is how it ends" thought in my head.

Thankfully we got to the hotel okay, which has to be a testament to the drivers skill and not the worn breaks or tiled roads we drove on... Yeah, the roads are tiled here, not paved. Doesn't that make them more slippery?

Anyway, the main thing is I made here and learned a valuable lesson: no matter how bad you think drivers in your country are, there always be worse ones somewhere else .