Hitting the road...

The UP state transport drivers love that song Hit the road Jack. In fact they think it's written for them, their style of driving - hit the road, oh yeah! And hit every pothole on the way. Which considering that UP road = pothole....

After some 7 - 8 hours of non stop bus travel off the mountains, we reached Rishikesh at 6 in the evening and found a bus about to leave for Delhi. And though we knew that it would be a hair raising journey (the bus was in worse shape than any Pallavan bus I've seen) but we got in nevertheless. At this point we didn't care as long as we got back to Delhi. It was as sane as a UP state transport bus could be, till we hit Roorkee. Somewhere along the road, the driver and conductor switched places...and the fun began.

The conductor (now the driver) kept stalling and moving forward in fits. At one point he found that the dhaba he wanted to go to for dinner was on the wrong side of the road divided. So when the divider ended, he took a sharp right turn and then somehow managed to back into the dhaba. No sweat, except for being on a national highway in the dark with other traffic zipping up and down. We continued to Meerut where they switched places again. Thank god!, thought I. I bet all the passengers heaved sighs of relief.

The driver (the original one) promptly got us lost inside a mohalla, almost ran down an old man and merrily waved away suggestions that it was not the best route and kept going through narrow roads, almost scraping lampposts and shop fronts.

Finally we managed to get back onto the highway.



Inside the bus from Rudraprayag to Rishikesh.