It’s a explosion on the senses of sight, smell and
sound. Traveling in India and Nepal is truly
an adventure! We have ridden in rickshaws, trains, and taxi’s of all
sorts. The roads are clogged with bicycles,
motorcycles, rickshaws, taxis, buses and trucks, not to mention domestic animals
towing carts of goods.
Horns, bells, and alarms are freely used to alert other
vehicles of your presence; so traveling any distance is a cacophony of
acceleration, braking, horns honking and constant swerving around
obstacles. SO HANG ON! But don’t let
your hands or arms extend outside the vehicle because they could get lopped off
in the close quarters.
Children freely traverse the streets seemingly oblivious of
what appears to us to be complete chaos. They watch us with a curious shyness
and sometimes waving with joyful faces. We notice a definite reverence for life
here and we have seen both the touching and the humorous sides of this care for
all living things. Cows freely wander the streets and are at times even
presented offerings of vegetables from street vendors. Other times we have
witnessed traffic surge around their inert forms (like unperturbed stones in a river
rapids); they calmly chew their cud while standing in the middle of an
intersection.
