EXPRESS HIGHWAY TO RAJASTHAN

The roads offer a variety of challenges, especially if you travel at night.  Road surfaces vary from poor to good and from dirt to tar and concrete.  But even on the Express Highway to Rajasthan, you had to be prepared for anything.  Traveling at night has the advantage of being cool and there is always something specially exciting about setting off on a long journey at midnight.  Once through the toll check point, we found that traffic was quite heavy and lining the route were all-night roadside stands offering tea, coffee and cold drinks.   Heavy trucks thundered past us - they seemed larger than anything I'd seen before, with towering loads strapped on with rope, brightly painted with patterns and the reminder written on the back to 'hoot' when overtaking.

Even on an Express Highway, you encounter herds of cows, single cows, flocks of sheep and goats, people and silent pilgrims walking through the night to a shrine.  Even a few wild animals like jackals and fox.  The driving can be unexpected as when we saw the lights of a truck bearing down on us on our side of the highway, looking for a gap to get back to the other side.   After a few hours' driving, we thought we had seen it all, when suddenly the headlights picked up the shape of a child standing in the middle of the road.  So many unanswered questions - why ?  And then there was the truck towing a car with barbed wire !  The occupants were highly amused at our astonishment and especially as we pulled alongside to film them.

The razzmatazz of the Express Highway is not to be missed, but driving is not for the faint-hearted.