I am 100% sure my last words will be “oh my god.” Every alarming situation I’ve ever been in has been met with a deadpan delivery of this phrase…along the lines of “Oh my god, this can’t possibly really be happening. What a dumb way to die…”
But there was just one time I was sure I was not long for the world. I got the bright idea to visit the Himalayas during monsoon season. The ride up was beautiful…misty valleys, green rice terraces, and tiny villages where enchanting women balance metal pots of water on their head as they walk down the road laughing. I saw all manner of unspeakable beauty as we slowly climbed up the mountains. Once there I stayed a while, but the hiking was bad because of the risk of rock slides. So I woke up one morning and hopped a bus back down.
The bus was full of sadhus (Hindu holy men) and I’m pretty sure thats why I got out of that bus alive.
Indian busses are a little alarming to begin with. They are brightly painted (swastikas are a major theme) and usually have some combination of flashing lights or blaring pop music. You are always posed with the problem- go to the back, where you will be tossed around with every little bump, or in the front, where you will be exposed to all the fuel fumes that go straight from the engine to the inside of the bus. Then there is the matter of the rain- a good 30% of the seats will be under a leaky part of the roof or window. Finally there is the mountain side/ ledge side debate. Do you want to see your impending doom or not?
They’ve got a system there. The bus driver drives, and a guy stands at the back door looking down and uses a code of whistles to communicate how close to the edge of the cliffs the bus is.
I chose the ledge side. I made myself comfy in a spot with only one major drip, put on my rain jacket, and then occupied myself with looking down. This was a one-lane highway and we were a big truck. I couldn’t see the valley floor through the mist that seemed to swirl down to infinity. As we moved, tiny rocks would fall down the sides. You could still hear them falling minutes later. I’m guessing the valley floor was thousands of feet deep. And our bus was rarely an inch away from that edge. The bus-whistler was looking a little ashen faced. I started wondering if the bus could right itself if just one wheel slipped off.
But our bus driver wanted only one thing- to get the hell out of there. We were speeding down that tiny highway at top speed. He’d accelerate to take the turns. One by one the sadhus heads popped out of the windows to vomit. I queasily joined them. Lugguage fell off the racks on to the wet floor as we tipped and turned. People started bracing themselves in hopes that they could break the fall if we tipped over. The sadhus prayed. My (Indian) companion whispered that if we started to fall our only hope would be to try to get out the window. 1,000 people die every day on India’s roads. He’d heard that sometimes the window thing works.
The driver sped up. He’s the only Indian driver I ever met that didn’t honk his horn at every possible oppertunity. Instead, there was dead silence broken only by vomiting. Occasionally we would slam to a stop when we rushed around a blind corner and found ourselves faced with a truck or bus trying to go up. The bus would skid on the wet road and some rocks would ominously fall. Then we’d have to back up the hill- sometimes for hundreds of feet- until we found a point wide enough to pass. Now and then we’d pass an old gnarled wreck of a bus or truck on the side of the road, long stripped of bodies and anything else removeable.
All around us, the first rains of the season was laying the beautiful scenery to waste. Whole mountain faces were washed out. Every mile or so we’d have to ford past as section of road that had been taken out by a rockslide. Our ancient bus would move inch by inch over the fresh rocks guided only by whistles. Sometimes things would slip alarmingly. Sometimes they had the passengers vacate the bus as they negotiated a particularly tricky bit. Sometimes the bus driver just said “fuck it” and hit the accelerator. These slides were probably only hours old. Sometimes a few rocks were still trickling down. Sometimes we passed a point just before a lot of rocks came pouring down. The mountains were tumbling down all around us.
At one point we came to a stop behind a line of trucks and busses. A car-sized boulder was in the middle of the road. We simply waited until enough trucks piled up to get a contingent of about twenty men together. Then they went back to their trucks, routed around for tools, and wedged whatever they could find under the rock. After a lot of shouting, it went tumbling down the edge. And tumbling. And tumbling. Trees snapped. Things roared. We all spent a minute contemplating how long it took that rock to come to a rest somewhere down in that mist. Then we cheered.
It was something like an eight hour ride. The next day I read in the paper about a few buses on that route that didn’t make it. I took a lot of busses there, and while each one was a little nervewracking, nobody was near as suicidal as that bus driver. I’ve got a lot of perspective on scary bus rides, and I know that was the time when there was a good chance that I was going to die.
