If you've been following my blog so far, you'd know that I've been having a pretty wild time with road safety in India. If you haven't been following my blog so far, well, you should. Here, I'll make it easy for you:
India is famous for its train service. It's slow, and it smells bad, but it's reliable, charming, and most of all, it's incredibly cheap. Because of its cost-effectiveness, trains generally tend to book out several days in advance. So plan B is a sleeper bus.
Sleeper buses suck.
Sure, the idea sounds nice on paper, right? You get on the bus, go to sleep, and wake up at your destination in the morning, well rested and ready to go about your day.
Hahahahahaha. No.
Getting a sleeper bus in India is a fucking ordeal.
The first problem is finding the bus, because no-one tells you that rather vital piece of information when booking your ticket. I spend two hours wandering around Panjim bus station looking for a bus, any bus, that says Fernandes Travels, which is the name of the operator that I've booked with from Goa to Mumbai. After showing my confirmation text message to about a dozen people, someone finally tells me that the bus journey is, in fact, operated by Naik Travels. Nice one.
Panjim Bus Station.
After a stressful afternoon, I find my bus just moments before it's due to leave, but the frustrations don't end there.
First of all, the sleeping berth is tiny; I'm 175cm, which isn't all that tall, but I manage to fill the entire recess, which I am also sharing with backpack and my US size 13 shoes. There's not enough room to sit up fully, so I have no choice but to lie down for the entire journey, and there's no toilet, which is fun when your digestive system is still adjusting to unknown bacteria. (That's a polite way of saying that I've had traveller's diarrhea since I left Hampi, and I've gotta try to hold that in for 14 hours.) If you're in a top bunk, bad luck. You aren't getting any sleep, because there's nothing holding you in, so you need to hold on when the bus goes around corners. And the suspension wallows like no-one's business.
Which brings me to my next gripe: it's fucking terrifying. India's roads aren't great; the highways are narrow, twisty, undulating and poorly surfaced. And the drivers are all a little bit crazy and selfish. The bus has an atrocious centre of gravity, with half the passengers lying up near the roof. Our driver has a horrible tendency to stomp on the brake pedal, and he also rides the brakes through corners, which are both excellent methods of exceeding the grip limits of tyres – something that you would kind of expect someone who drives for a living to know! Oh yeah, and it's fucking monsoon season so the roads are soaked! Not to mention, you're lying down, with nothing to brace against, so if anything does happen, you're screwed. As I said - terrifying.
This is a luxurious version – the ones in India don't look like this. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.)
Whether due to chance, serendipity, or divine intervention, we somehow survive the night, winding through the wet, twisty, dangerous highway. We've reached the nice, wide, flat, 8-lane motorway into Mumbai. It should be smooth sailing from here, right? Well...
At about 7.30am, some genius in a lorry speeds up alongside the bus and cuts in front. We rear end the lorry, obliterating the bus' windscreen. At this exact moment, everything goes into slow motion. There's a theory behind this; apparently in the face of imminent danger, the resultant adrenaline surge causes a spike in brain activity, we start to process information more quickly, and therefore everything appears to be happening in slow motion. Or something.
The driver slams on the brakes for no good reason whatsoever. The lorry has already sped off up the motorway. The crash should be over and done with, but we've already established that the driver has zero concept of smoothness or mechanical sympathy. The brakes lock up. We begin sliding on the wet, greasy road. Drifting towards the concrete guardrail.
I just wait. Wait for something to hit us from behind and finish the job. Wait for the bus to flip and for everyone to be tossed from their shitty sleeper pods. Wait to die, pretty much. Time has almost stopped altogether.
Nothing hits us. We crunch sideways into the guardrail; thankfully at a low enough speed that the bus doesn't tip over. Now what? Nothing, apparently. Everyone piles off the bus, luggage in hand, and stands there on the side of the motorway in the rain. All of the other passengers seem to know what they're doing and where they're going. I don't.
I'd like to say that this is a photo of a once-glorious bus, but it was never glorious. Also, if you look closely, you'll see that just behind the bus is another bus that has suffered the same fate. Brilliant.
So, stranded 40km from central Mumbai, on the side of an 8 lane motorway, in torrential rain, I do something incredibly stupid. I hail a rickshaw. Because 3 wheels on a slippery motorway with trucks and buses flying past on both sides seems like a fantastic idea. The rickshaw is bouncing and hydroplaning all over the place. I am absolutely white-knuckling. This is the end for sure, I'm thinking. My heart is in my throat.
Nope. I'm still alive. We make it as far as the boundary between the city and the suburbs, and the rickshaw is allowed to go no further. The driver bundles me out and into a taxi. I tell the cabbie to take me to Leopold's, a famous cafe in Mumbai's city centre. I figure it's a safe, foreigner friendly place while I figure out my next move. Also, I really, really need to use the bathroom.
The world's worst bus ride costs me 800 rupees, plus I spend another 500 on taxis. The train would have cost me 500 rupees and dropped me right in the heart of Mumbai with a minimum of hassle. I note this for next time.