Strap yourself in and hold on...

To enjoy a roller coaster, you have to sit back, take a deep breath, and place your trust in the machinery and the harness holding you down; because really, there isn’t much of anything you can do about it now. I get that same feeling every time I step into an automobile in India (the same except that vehicles here tend to lack seat belts...). Be it an air conditioned car, a bursting-at-the-seams bus, or a rickety auto rickshaw, every vehicle on the roads of India is driven with reckless abandon, and road rules are reduced to a simple few:
Lines on the road are more like suggestions than rules. Leaving more than two inches of space between vehicles is inviting another vehicle to cut in front of you. Side mirrors are expendable (and don’t last long). And finally, horns are actually a valid and verbose form of communication.

Of course, these rules stretched even further when avoiding the nonchalant cattle strolling across roads (including major highways and large city arteries), or if you’re one of the thousands motorbikes crawling the roadways like ants (rarely with less than 2 riders and often as many as 4). After a weekend of travelling Rajasthani roads to the local sightseeing destinations, we’ve come to have a new appreciation for just how insane traffic is on these narrow, busy Indian roads.

Our brief travels showed us a strange Indian tendency towards bringing the surreal into the everyday. We visited the holy lake town of Pushkar (where the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi were spread), a destination for Hindu pilgrimages and tourists alike, to find the lake bone dry. We climbed a steep and jagged hillside, and bravely avoided malicious monkeys, to see a famed Hindu temple, which housed only a nondescript idol framed by incongruous flashing Christmas lights. In Jaipur, we scaled yet another small mountain to Jaigargh Fort, visiting the home a 450 ton cannon (forged on site), which was only fired once, and took four elephants to rotate and aim. In the stately Amber Fort, we followed an over-the-top audio guide, which made every building, gate, courtyard, and water reservoir we saw into a character which talked at great length. We continued to be bombarded with head-tilt worthy sights as we descended on Jaipur city itself, visiting an ear-shattering, hyper-glitzy nightclub with all of about ten people inside, shuffling around to obscenely loud bad 90s music.

To end off the weekend in style (both the classy kind, and the surreal), we ascended the 14 story Om Tower (which receives my personal favourite Lonely Planet description as “a lonely cylindrical spaceship that crash landed in Jaipur many years ago, which has been rusting in the smog ever since.”) to soak up the night time view of the city from their revolving restaurant. Not to let this get mundane just as we ended our trip, India came through in great style by putting on a continuous fireworks display through the entire meal. With a steady spread of fireworks shooting into the sky from every section of the city, we enjoyed a spectacular impromptu light show as happy couples all across the city finished off the final day of their wedding celebrations.

After wrapping up our little side trip, we were able to relax on the long drive back to Jodhpur to the sounds of dozens of varieties of novelty horns on transport trucks, and the screeching Indian pop music from our driver’s stereo. All said and done, we are happy to be back in Jodhpur and excited to dive into work again, a kind of surreal that’s a little bit more familiar.