It is worth one more shot to describe the up and down of the roads in Sikkim before getting (in the next post) to another episode with Indian Bureaucrats.
True, while harping on the cliché of a place (here it is driving, in Amsterdam it is weed and prostitutes) may only indicate one’s inability to see beyond the obvious, such clichés also arise from how difficult it is to capture the thing you can’t stop seeing.
Did you think that because the road is barely big enough to fit two vehicles side-by-side the other the strategy would be to hug your side of the road as much as possible? When time is, as ever, of the essence?
Instead what you do is float to the middle, or even go to the opposite side of the road if that's where the surface conditions are better, and then, as the car that would kill you honks or flashes its lights (there is clearly a complicated, morse code-like set of signals which tell you what to do) the dance of veering hard left or gently right, someone stopping or someone not, begins such that you learn to trust you won’t die . . . won’t die in just the way you know the volcano won’t erupt, the leaky damn won’t give way or, as is all too common here, the road which, were it to slide off the side of the mountain while you car goes over it, won’t slide away and take you with it.
(A news story in the paper, today is about a road nearby that has washed out and left a whole region stranded.)
Still, despite not quite adjusting to the need for Dramamine because of the Ford Road Test comfort level, the potholes sometimes too big not to inch down into or, as with snow and ice, too muddy not to gun your way out of, I have found myself just trusting that I will survive each journey, as I mostly have.
And, oddly, each driving experience, to say nothing commuting as a whole, becomes a testament to the automobile, if of nothing else