Where there's a Horn, there's a Way

The traffic in Bangalore is crazy and thus corresponds exactly to our expectations. The streets are full of tuk-tuks, SUVs, motorcycles and scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, buses, cars and every now and then a bullock cart or tractor comes along.

You can cover a distance of 20 km sometimes in one hour, sometimes in two hours, but stop and go is omnipresent. Not only once did I feel sick in my stomach.

The metro is not yet fully developed, plus there are many construction sites narrowing the roads and the disadvantages of the delivery service. More than 60,000 vehicles from Swiggy and Co bring traffic to a standstill.

Crossing the road is still an adventure for us. Every time, we clap each other off happily when we have once again made it safely to the other side. And that, although we are now even used to left-hand traffic. So we are already looking in the right direction, but unfortunately there are ghost drivers. Or traffic coming from a direction we don't have on our radar.
 
Most of the time we look for a policeman who regulates the traffic. This helps us then over the road. If no policeman is in sight, we look whether another pedestrian would like to cross the street, from me even a dog. After all, they are still alive.

If nothing else helps then we go in pairs. In contrast to Germany - where we only start walking when we know that the gap is big enough to cross the whole street - in India we cross the street piece by piece by piece. At the same time, we reach out our hand to the motorists in a dismissive manner. The hand of the force...

Not only the traffic is adventurous, but also the vehicles themselves. I am no longer surprised when three or four people sit on just one motorcycle, a child sits in front and steers the scooter, or seven people squeeze into a small tuk-tuk. These things are just normal.

But I am still surprised when I see huge vans loaded with hundreds of bags. And then I find out that there are red chilies in these sacks. So many chilies as on a truck here, are not sold in my village in a year. Also nice are transporters full of ginger, cauliflower or coconuts. Sometimes I see a truck loaded with two people and two cows. Ox-drawn carts transport sugar cane, but there are also carts which are simply pushed by hand.

Buses and trucks are brightly painted and often decorated with snappy slogans 😉. "Please honk" is written on the back of most of them. And that's what they do here. A small short honk for "Attention I'm passing", a long one for "you idiot can't push your way in here". Since people are constantly passing and pushing, the background noise is deafening.

On our trip to Coorg we even found out that our car has two horns with different sounds. In addition, there are police officers and parking attendants with whistles. They even whistle when there is no traffic at all - their way of communicating.

Since there is neither a Technical Supervisory Association nor an Automobile Club in India, vehicles also tend to break down. In order to signal to other road users that the car or truck is no longer moving, a branch with leaves is clearly visible clamped to the vehicle. I wonder if this comes from Leaf to the same-sounding word Leave.

We have not yet unraveled the mysteries of traffic. In time, however, we will certainly become masters at it - and perhaps I will dare to get behind the wheel myself someday.