Come drive the eroding roads

It’s not as if I’m a shrinking violet on the road – in fact, I’m a typical Sydney driver – aggressive, rapid, short-tempered and selfish. But within a few kilometres of Delhi airport, seeing how locals behaved on a multi-lane freeway, I was certain I’d done the right thing in allowing the tour company to provide a local driver.

For the next two weeks, we’d cover almost 2,000km as we ventured north-east on narrow, winding, unsealed mountain roads into the state of Himachal Pradesh and the Kinnaur and Spiti valleys.

When you climb to over 5,000m in a few days you expect to spend a lot of time crossing your fingers as you traverse yet another one-lane blind corner cut into a cliff face with nothing but a crumbling earth edge and a thousand metre drop on the other side. We got lost, we changed flat tyres… all as you’d expect on any lengthy bush trip.

But unique to this trip, we were also wedged against a rock face by a passing lorry, almost washed off a mountainside by a monsoon mudslide, drove underneath the titanic waterfall exiting a hydroelectric turbine, and at all times were subject to the amusing, complex and sometimes terrifying code of conduct which are the ‘Himalayan Road Rules.’

For the benefit of CARSguide readers, here’s a quick survival guide for your next venture on the subcontinent.

Himalayan Road Rules

1. You are your horn. Communicate even the smallest thought or gesture using the button in the middle of your steering wheel. It’s just responsible driving to beep when approaching a blind hairpin bend that’s only wide enough for one car to pass, because there’s almost certainly an overloaded lorry or bus coming the other way.

But it’s also a good idea to use your horn to let other drivers know that you’re overtaking, that you’re changing lanes, pulling over, that you believe you have right of way, that you’re happy, that you’re tired, and that you were the last vehicle past the landslide around the next corner. Learn to interpret the different lengths and intensity of beep and you’ll be able to understand the complex series of messages that pass between drivers on mountain roads; the poetry of the mountain highways.

2. If it’s behind you, it’s not there. Locals drive with their side mirrors folded in, to make squeezing past other vehicles easier when the unsealed, soft-shouldered road on the edge of the precipice is only one and a half vehicles wide - most of the time.

Rear view mirrors are useless because the additional people, goods and livestock you’ll pick up en-route is limited only by the ceiling of your vehicle or the load-bearing capacity of your rear axle. Besides, if there’s a vehicle behind you, it’ll beep.

3. Safe overtaking distances are measured in beeps. A 4WD travelling at 40km/hr behind a heavily-loaded passenger bus travelling at 38km/hr wishes to overtake. There is 100m of unsealed, soft-shouldered road between the bus and the next blind curve. What is the minimum distance required in which to attempt to overtake? Hint: the correct answer is measured in beeps, not metres.

You’ll need enough time to ask the bus driver if he thinks you should overtake, for him to reply, for you to signal your intention to overtake, and then for him to concede the lead; all done with beeps. Once you’ve both agreed that overtaking will be attempted, then you must complete the overtake, no matter how much squeezing, swerving and emergency braking is required to do so. I’m not sure what the penalty is for chickening-out, but I assume it carries a death penalty, judging by the at-all-costs approach taken to most overtaking manoeuvres.

4. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) is trying its best. Ancient seabeds just weren’t made to be tilted on their side, and certainly were never intended to make a stable, permanent road base.

The state of Himachal Pradesh is essentially one big mass of ancient seabed, simultaneously being raised into the sky by the colliding Asian Plate and eroding just as quickly back into the Arabian Sea.

You don’t need to be a geologist to spot erosion at work – most BRO road crews clear landslides by just pushing them off the side of the road, using explosives, bulldozers and much of the time, their bare hands. As most roads zig-zag down a mountain, this means the landslide just rolls down the mountainside onto a lower section of road. The BRO, charged with the ‘mission impossible’ of trying to keep some sort of road network open while the Himalayas crumble down around it, shrugs its shoulders and walks down the hill to shift it again. What else can you do?

More than once, the rocks tumbling down the hill towards our car had been set in motion by a BRO road crew further up the mountain. So in case you’re cursing them for the life-threatening state of their road network, the BRO gets busy with road-signs bearing some classic messages including these:

”BRO never looks back” (neither do road users)

”Accidents don’t happen, they are caused” (though BRO may share some of the blame)

“Darling, I want you, but not so fast” (a saucy warning to slow down)

”Be mild on my curves”

And this one, above an annual tally of employee fatalities:

”BRO: putting our lives on the line for your safety”

 

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Alan Jones travelled to India at his own expense, with YakTrak Tours and despite the driving adventures, had a wonderful time.