22 December 2015
Fabian was very keen to visit one of
the waterfalls near Khajuraho, but Tim was not, since he wanted to write
postcards. So Fabian, Joline and I decided to go. The drive lasted a couple of
hours, but we never made it to the waterfalls. We did not correctly insert the
address in the GPS device, and it took us to the end of the street on which our
Ashram was situated. But that part of the street was perhaps the most chaotic
little street I had seen. Scores of motorbikes, bicycles, feral cattle, bullock
carts, busses, hand carts, hawkers selling vegetables. So we decided to
properly enter the address for the waterfalls in the GPS device and we were set
in motion. Very slowly.
We had go around a block of huts to
turn around, but the streets around the block were hardly wider than the car
itself. And the intersections were the worst – open gutters on one side of the
streets, which were infested by motorbikes, children and goats running about,
and one large bull! There was a large hole between the gutter and the centre of
the street, and my heart was in my mouth when I had to drive with the left
wheels between the two. At one point the bull decided he wanted to go the other
way and squeezed himself between a hut and the car almost taking the side-view
mirror with him. But the worst was yet to come. There was a street market where
several women had laid out their vegetables on the sides of the narrow road. It
was next to impossible to reverse the car without crashing, so we decided to
soldier on.
More motorbikes. They could see us.
They could see there was no room for them to pass by. Yet, they just rode all
the way to the front of the car and got stuck there. One of them, much like the
bull, tried to squeeze between a hut and the car, slightly scratching it.
In what completely took me by
surprise, Joline, who had otherwise been wary of crowds in India, which are
primarily populated by men, jumped out of the car and started managing the
traffic. Fabian followed her in a bit. Despite not knowing the language, they
managed to get the motorbikes back, and some of the women to take their vegetables
out of the way. One woman, however, did not seem to care much, and some of her
radishes were crushed under a wheel. The other women laughed, and one man
commented to her “How nice. He’s made
chutney for you. It will fetch a higher price for you!” This woman, and the
others who had not yet, finally took their vegetables out of the car’s way. I
profusely apologised, but kept moving. It took us over half an hour before we
could go around that little block.
As relieved as I was to get out of
the tentacles of rural Indian traffic, I was more impressed by Joline’s courage
and wit, without which the ordeal would have been much more difficult.
[I do remember that I was not going
to write about the traffic, but given the extraordinary nature of this
incident, I have allowed myself this exception.]
We were finally on the way to the
waterfalls but ran out of road a few kilometres later – it was dug up for
renewal. But we did not return empty handed. Not only did the experience leave
us with a great story to tell, we also saw some of the eastern and the southern
groups of temples on the way.
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