Where Horn Blowing & Tailgating Are Okay!
Blowing a horn, tailgating, flashing high beams all at once can incite road rage in most countries. But on India's narrow country roads, those gestures create an awareness of vehicles passing.
We left Pune, India on the main highway, to visit a nearby wind turbine factory and later, we were driving to a wind farm farther out in the hills outside of the city. I was with my friend Usha, who lives in Pune and works for our company. She’d setup the visit to Suzlon, a global wind turbine manufacturer. Usha had also arranged a driver and car for our trip.
Once we left the Suzlon factory and got beyond Pune onto backcountry roads, our young driver became very animated and aggressively tried to pass every truck in front of us. He immediately had my attention. I was pressing my feet into the floor boards as he raced up behind slow moving lorries and hovered about one meter off their back bumper, blowing his horn, flashing his headlights, occasionally nosing the car out into oncoming two-lane traffic, probing for a brief opening to pass.
There was a constant flow of vehicles in the opposite direction. There were camels on the road. More horn blowing. Flashing head lights. Right on the truck’s back bumper.
I started to notice that all the trucks had these signs painted on the backend of the truck - Blow Horn. Or Horn Okay Please! Some added a sign that said - Flash Lights! And every driver was doing this
From the factory near Pune, it was 120km to the wind farm on back country roads. In modern highway terms, 120km isn’t very far. But on the backroads of India that is a considerable distance considering all the obstacles along the way.
In India, vehicles drive on the left, British style. So everything is reversed from the American notion of highways. I soon observed that there were two traffic flows coming at our car. The official lane on the right and the ‘unofficial’ left hand shoulder. There seemed to be a constant flow of people, bicycles, and animals moving along the unpaved road shoulder. That’s where camel drawn carts might be. Maybe an occasional heavy duty truck, filled to the top with people, tilted toward the ditch but lumbering along slowly.
It took me a while to adjust to this new driving style. Then I started to relax. The kid seemed to have it under control.
The drive to the wind farm took on a certain journey aspect, with all of the sights and sounds and encounters along the way. We had to ask locals for directions a few times as the road wound through the countryside and split off into different unmarked directions. Then there were goat herds that we got surrounded by, small villages we’d stop at, buy some water and bananas, and affirm directions.
Visiting Suzlon
The day had started out at the Suzlon factory near Pune. The factory manager at Suzlon had graciously welcomed us, provided a tour of the facility, and hosted a special lunch where we were joined by many of the employees. From the factory, we’d set out onto the country road to visit the firm’s wind farm where turbines were generating electricity.
We made it just fine to the wind farm, though it was late in the afternoon. The crew welcomed Usha and I and served a light meal of tea, bread, and a green vegetable based spread. We took a truck out to the wind turbines that loomed up from the hillsides. A thick haze in the atmosphere created an early glow of the approaching sunset. Some of the turbine towers looked different than what I’d seen in North America and Europe. They were not enclosed towers, but fabricated by an open steel structure, like the Eiffel Tower.
The wind farm crew took Usha and I to a tower that had an elevator in it. It was about 100 meters high. We rode up to the top of the tower in a tiny open cage elevator that rose inside the tower and walked out to a catwalk, suspended 100 meters above the ground. The giant turbine was in motion with its three enormous blades cutting through the air. The blades created a deep resonance, whooshing sound. The technician asked me if I wanted to climb onto the top of the turbine from the catwalk?
“You mean stand up there?” I responded pointing up the side of the huge turbine shroud, slightly shocked.
“Yes, we will put a safety line on you.”
He was serious.
“No thanks, haha. I think I’ll just stay here on the open catwalk. A hundred meters is plenty high,” I said. People looked like ants on the ground.
First, I was amazed that they even offered such exposure. That wouldn’t happen in the States. You’d never get near the top of a tower, without signing accident and release wavers, if even then. I suppose I could have climbed up there and had the sense of riding a giant, wind driven, energy creating monster, like a scene out of Avatar. But I remained on the catwalk. The view was fabulous enough.
From the catwalk I photographed a nearby wind tower with the sun starting to set behind it. The scale of these monsters are hard to fathom in the distance. Once you are up in the air standing next to the rotating hub, you really sense the enormity and speed of the blades. The outer tips of the blades can travel at more than 160kph, even though the hub is turning at a slower rate.
Once back on the ground, we began our drive back toward Pune. I would relive all the crazy driving situations that we’d experienced coming out to the wind farm; tracing our way back through the small towns, through the traffic snarls, the trucks, perhaps a brahma bull sitting in a lane that all traffic had to drive around, but this time, the trip would be in the dark.
The flashing headlights were more dramatic at night, though our young driver still blew the horn, tail gated and jockeyed for passing slots between oncoming lights. The camels, pedestrians and bicycles did not have lights. You had to drive almost with a sixth sense at night in rural India. I’m still not sure why I was so comfortable with that whole driving scenario.
It was the opposite end of the earth from the German Autobahn, where I’d driven with my friend Hartmut at 280kph in his Audi. But somehow, both roadway experiences would register as two of the most memorable rides, ever.
jhg - 2008