Indian death vessels - aka the bus.
Travelling with the ex mrs a few years ago across India, i was nearly killed in a number of horrible ways (con men, packs of wild dogs, wild monkeys and a scooter crash amongst others) - but nothing came close to the nerve shredding tension of hurtling down a mountain on an over-packed rusted death machine, with shit brakes in the baking delirious heat.

Because my girlfriend thought it would be cost efficient (which it was).

Now imagine most of the journeys consisted of the driver flooring it, narrowly missing pedestrians, cyclists, rikshaws and other vehicles.... Sometimes we'd be travelling through the baking deserts and roadtracks for literally fifteen hours. The odd sight of another crushed up, burnt out bus lying discarded at the side of the road did nothing to cheer me up.

The mountain journeys were even worse though, as there was generally only one traffic lane, which meant on more than one occasion a near-miss with another bus travelling towards us became commonplace.
Also, in most locations the Indians didn't really bother with crash barriers, instead they believed that a little dangling Ganesh figurine would bring them the luck we needed on the road - all good for the believers, but this atheist wanted a little bit more protection against the prospect of tumbling hundreds and hundreds of feet down an isolated and extremely rocky mountainside, inside a sardine tine death trap.

Oh, and combine all of the above with a crippling case of diarrhoea and you might just take a glimpse into what wakes me up at night with cold sweats and vietnam style flashbacks.

Great days.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 19:02, Reply)