December 23, 2012: Fog Fighters

I eyed the passport-checkers carefully.  Officials in Atlanta and Newark had warned me that the smattering of mildew spots on my passport could create problems at immigration.  I didn’t know when or how the spots had appeared, and they seemed insignificant to me, but having crossed the Atlantic, Europe, and some of Asia to arrive in Delhi, this was not the time to take chances.  Immigration was, I told myself, the last hurdle between me and Jaipur.  Once through, I had only to use my cab voucher and sit for the four-hour car ride from Delhi to Jaipur.  I chose my agent carefully and walked up.

As it turned out, immigration was a breeze.  The cab ride was a different story.

I’ll tell it briefly.  The voucher promised that I’d receive an SMS—i.e., a text message—telling me how to meet up with the driver.  It never came.  When I called the phone number listed on the voucher, I could not communicate with the guy who answered.  He hung up on me.  I called back and passed the phone to Gus, a passenger from my flight who had been born in southern India but lived in Detroit.  But Gus spoke a different dialect from the guy at the other end of the phone and they couldn’t communicate.  The guy hung up again.  I found another native-born traveler—this guy had lived in Atlanta—and he called back on my behalf.  After several phone calls back and forth, the guy at the other end agreed to send a cab to the airport and promised that it would be there in fifteen minutes or so.  He gave us a phone number for the driver, but the driver didn’t answer when we called.  So I stood at the curb with Gus, who had time to kill between flights, in the chill dark and gathering fog.

Gus

Just when I was about to give up, a man in a down jacket walked up to us.  He glanced around, then looked at me.  “Jaipur?” he asked.  I hugged him.  I bade goodbye to Gus and settled into the cab of Lai Singh for a pleasant ride through country I was looking forward to seeing.

The drive started well.  We moved fast, beeping the horn and weaving in and out of garishly-painted trucks whose horns trilled like electronic songbirds when they replied.  In India, I was delighted to learn, blowing the horn isn’t an expression of anger—Indian motorists blow their horns like American pedestrians nod at one another.  It’s a matter of courtesy and routine, just a way to say hello and I’m-about-to-pass-you.  Delhi was a maze of trucks and rickshaws, highways and streets, grand buildings and shanties.  I was excited.

And then the fog rolled in.  I mean serious fog, like I’ve only seen once or twice before.  We’d gotten a late start on the driver because of the difficulty in communicating with the cab company, and it was midnight when we hit the fog—or the fog hit us—with full force.  According to the news reports on my iPhone, the fog was delaying not only cars, but airplanes and trains.  Consider that—the fog delayed trains.  It’s not like trains have great difficulty in choosing their direction of travel--that’s pretty well decided already.  This was serious fog.

fog through the windshield

From midnight to 3:30am, we slowed to a crawl.  We averaged 35 kmh—about 22 mph.  Even then obstacles appeared from the murk with disturbing rapidity, and Lai Singh’s brakes got a workout.  I also discovered, upon quick calculation, that 35 kmh is a discouraging rate of travel on a 270 km journey.

This was a long drive and hairy enough to make me nervous.  My driver was frustrated, and I had difficulty feeling him out, as he spoke no English other than “okay” and “rupees.”  I spoke no Hindi.  I was cursing myself for exposing myself to this risk, because I was entirely at his mercy.  He stopped once in the middle of the highway to converse with another cab driver in the lane next to us.  He stopped again for food in a place that had shut down.  He stopped to converse with another driver, and after they spoke on the side of the highway, he charged me another 200 rupees.  I groused a little bit just so I wouldn’t appear to be a pushover, then paid.  We stopped again for chai.  Then we drove on.

stopping for chai

The fog cleared about 150 km outside of Jaipur, and at about 5:30 am, luggage in hand, I walked up the stairs of the Siddharth Palace hotel.  It was a wonderfully clean and safe-feeling place.  I entered the room that I was to share with my law school buddy Naveen Ramachandrappa.  I woke him up and immediately gave my very drowsy-looking friend a bear hug.  I have known Naveen for a long time now, and have enjoyed his company on many occasions, but I have never been quite this glad to see him.