Ek Mandi Bas
It’s only fair, since I did a similar post on Mexican buses when I was in San Miguel, that I write a bit about Indian buses, too. “Town” from here is Mandi, about 45 minutes away driving the 24 kilometer road that winds through the hills. The bus takes more like an hour and a half, because of all the stops at local villages. As for the ride itself, I’ll try to describe it by analogy.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re at Disneyland, most likely near FantasyLand. Now picture getting into one of those innocuous rides like “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride”, or “Peter Pan”.
Now picture doing the same thing, about 400 feet up.
Oh, and the equipment you’re riding on is the original stuff from about 1955.
And there’s other sets of coasters coming the opposite direction on the same track your coasters are using.
And then there’s the occasional living obstacles like cows, goats, and children, who wander in the way from time to time.
And…did I mention that all safety restraints and guard rails and stuff like that have been permanently removed? No? My bad.
That kind of sums up the experience, in a nutshell. The twisty mountain roads of northern India are paved a bit smoother than the gravelly tracks of Mexico, but there are no guardrails, or other vehicle stoppers. Along the best maintained stretches, they’ve placed rocks painted white at regular intervals. The rocks are too small to actually prevent a vehicle of any size from going over the high side–they’re more of a warning device. It’s common to look out the window, and, if you make the mistake of looking down, end up looking at the tops of farmers and cows a couple hundred feet below. The place to look is across, where you can get the best view of the misty hillsides and valley vistas.
Another place to avoid looking at is through the front windshield, which will display examples of yaw, pitch, and roll normally seen only outside the windows of a student-flown Cessna. Ironically, if you are looking in that direction at all, there will be plenty of stuff to distract you, because no Indian vehicle is really complete without some little shrine to the gods on the dashboard. And despite the fact that roadside shrines and temples tend to appear every few kilometers or so, a few minutes on any mountain road is enough to convince one of the absolute need for a dashboard deity. The decorations range from the subtle to the sublime to the ridiculous.
Even the smallest private vehicle will have something on the dashboard to propitiate the demons of the road. It may be no more than a bit a red cloth decked with gold tinsel, or a small plastic statue of Ganesh, Laxmi, or Shiva. But no bus is complete without a full-on shrine up front, decked out with strand after strand of tinsel, holiday lights, and plastic flowers. Long-distance truckers–commonly called “public carriers” here–also pimp out their rides on the outside, adding fancy wrought iron work, bright colors, blinking lights, paintings of Shiva and Garuda, along with patriotic fervor like “India is great.” I find the Garuda decoratoins on autorickshaws the most ironic. Some autorickshaw drivers deck the roofs of ther cars with these little statues of Garuda in flight. The plastic wobbles in the slightest breeze generated by movement, so it’s not unusal to see an autorickshaw putt-putting along at 20 kph, with its Garuda decorations flapping like mad, as if they’re assisting the engine in getting the passengers somewhere.
But I digress….back to our bus.
A bus crew includes one guy, stationed in the rear of the bus, in addition to the driver. This second crewman I think of as ‘the purser,’ since his jobs involves carrying a purse with a shoulder strap. This guy has several jobs, including helping people on and off, collecting fares, and so on. The most important job by far is acting as the driver’s rearview mirror, since the bus doesn’t really have any. A single whistle lets the driver know to either stop, and let someone off, or go, because everyone’s on board. The purser uses more complicated signals for backing up and turning while in reverse. When two buses meet on a mountain road, they back and fill delicately around each other, like two old ladies shifting past one another in a very narrow hallway. The whistle of the purser is what keeps a bus from simply shuffling over a cliff edge by mistake, so I’ve come to find the shrill tweets and toots to be a reassuring sound.
