Gabriel Travelin' Assorted real-life first-person wild and crazy adventure travelin' stories spanning the globe which I myself wrote with my own two bare stinkin' hands...

I wish I could say now that I'd hitchhiked in India. The only thing is that I never, for a moment, actually wanted to be hitchhiking while I was there. I met folks who had done it-on little mountain roads winding through the Himalaya, where they were picked up and tossed, along with their luggage, onto the rack on top; and then held on for dear life as the bus brushed under tree limbs and careened around hairpin corners, skirting cliffs that dropped down a thousand feet or more.

Just riding the bus the usual way in India was more excitement than I was generally in the mood for. The highway system over there is nothing short of chaos.

Imagine this: You're on a rickety old bus somewhere between two major Indian cities, flying down a decrepit two-lane highway (pretty much the only kind they have). You come, as happens regularly, to a long line of busses and large delivery-trucks lined up behind one another, slowed down by a vehicle in the front of the line. Your bus driver happens to be the type who drank a little too much chai at the last rest stop-nothing out of the ordinary, he's just a little more pushy now than the other drivers.

He pulls out to pass the long row of vehicles. Immediately, you see a large truck coming at you a short ways down the road. This doesn't seem to concern your driver in the slightest. He just keeps on barreling down the opposing lane, creeping sluggishly past the first, second, third, and then fourth vehicle.

Nearing the fifth and second-to-last vehicle in the line, the truck coming at you is now alarmingly close-much too close for your own bus to clear the end of the line. Your stomach starts to wrench with acute distress.

And then-with a sudden, horrifying realization of impending tragedy-you realize that, in addition to this disturbing scenario, the truck coming down the road towards you is also being passed by a hasty and manic bus driver. Neither does this undeniable absurdity concern your driver terribly.

There are now two parallel lanes of traffic both filled with vehicles going in opposing directions-the only reasonable outcome here being a catastrophic, head-on pile-up. None of the vehicles are slowing down at all. The people seated in the bus around you are eerily comatose. You're on the verge of leaping out of your seat, and running to the front of the bus to grab a hold of the steering wheel and careen the rig off into the desert to avoid certain doom. But then, something miraculous occurs in the course of a few split seconds.

Your bus driver casually sticks his arm out the window, signaling to the truck he's just passing-who puts on his brakes a little, creating barely enough space between him and the truck at the front of the line. At the last possible instant, your bus suddenly pulls over into your proper lane, sliding in between the two vehicles. The other bus coming in your direction simultaneously whips in front of the truck that it was passing, flying through the space you were just occupying only moments before. The two rows of vehicles manage then to glide smoothly past one another without incident; everything clicking together like a colossal and terrifying game of highway-Tetris.

No one else on the bus would be having the same heart-pounding, near-death experience as yourself. They would just be sitting there calmly, snacking on peanuts or fussing with their children or whatever, since that was pretty much a routine Indian bus ride experience.

After my first harrowing month on busses in India, I made a point of taking the trains whenever possible. Not only were they much safer and less nerve-wracking, but they were also a hell of a lot more comfortable. And whenever I did happen to ride the bus, I would sit way in the back, so that I couldn't see the road ahead. I would hold my backpack on my lap, between myself and the back of the seat in front of me, as some sort of minimal protection in case I were suddenly hurled forward in the general direction of my demise.

It's amazing that the Indian traffic system works at all. In addition to the highways being insanely congested, they're also shared by everything from the usual busses, trucks and passenger cars, to farmers on puttering tractors, ox-drawn carts, cocky young men on motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, the occasional camel or elephant, and of course the ever-present sacred cows standing wherever they please. The roads often appear simply as an entangled mess of frenetic activity and moving objects, that seem to have little order or predictability. Somehow, these opposing moving vehicles and bodies manage to coexist without causing total mayhem, and even without running into one another too terribly often. I'm reminded of a piece of trivia that my friend Abram once shared as a kid (whether true or not, it makes the point)-that large bumblebees are able to fly, not because their wingspan-bodyweight ratio actually allows it; but simply because they believe, without question, that they should be able to.

The Indian roadways, and the country in general, similarly seem to work not because it makes much practical, rational sense, but because the people living there have little choice other than to assume that things will somehow work out, if they're going to get anything at all accomplished in their overpopulated country.