I think I’ve already mentioned that at the planning stages of this India leg of our trip, we tried to use the railways as much as possible. We certainly didn’t want to see India from ‘thirty thousand feet’. A possibly more onerous restriction we had set ourselves, however, was avoiding some of the very long train journeys, often well in excess of twenty hours. In order to do that we chose certain towns as a stopover along the route. Chittorgarh had been one such choice, Ahmedabad another. Now, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how it came to be decided how long we would stay in any particular town. Ahmedabad, we had four nights and therefore three days, we now wondered why. Another wonder: why ever had we decided on the coach. I think that particular wonder was fed by the experience of our previous coach trip between Jodhpur and Jaisalmer an experience that left us with the feeling that we should look again at other possibilities.
There are three trains between Udaipur and Ahmedabad: two of them leave at 3:15 am and arrive at around 7 or 8 am, the other leaves in the early evening and arrives at around 11pm. There you are, that’s why the ‘semi-sleeper’ bus journey. It leaves at a very reasonable 8am and arrives at a perfect 2pm. We salved our wounds from that last trip with the balm that at least this time we wouldn’t be sitting around at 5.30am trying to figure out which bus to get. One lingering scar from last time, that the picture of the bus on your ticket, likely won’t be a picture of the bus you’ll board, rather the picture on your ticket will be of the latest bus they’ve added to their stable, maybe even the one their still hoping to buy. All shiny and new, very unlike the one you’ll get. Semi-Sleeper? Surely that has to be more comfortable than whatever designation they had given that last bus.
On looking over our ticket again, however, we realised there was a new problem with this trip. Last time we were given a very specific pick-up location and it was literally 500m from our hotel. This time: ‘If there is no location specified’ and a choice of three numbers to call. I hadn’t yet obtained my Indian SIM, so I was using Skype and none of the numbers worked. Apparently Indian numbers do not accept foreign calls, or was that just Skype calls. You always think your question was understood and although you’re still trying to work the answer out as you leave, you believe you also understood the answer. As you go over the whole conversation again in your head you suddenly see all the amiguities in your questions and the replies you discover you’ve added nothing to your repository of knowledge. Anyway, time to enlist the help of another local, the cafe owner where we’d had breakfast the last couple of mornings. He found out, unambiguously (you hope) ,that the pick-up point was at the company’s local office which, according to Google, was near the bus station.
Now let me tell you about bus stations, insofar as our very limited experience of Indian bus stations allows me. We have only actually seen one bus station. We happened upon it on our first day walking around Ahmedabad. Much like a bus station in any major city - lots of bus stands with destinations and numbers, except here they were exclusively in Hindi. It was what we would call, I suppose, a municipal bus station. Easy to identify in one way at least - all the buses are the same colour.
We decided to use the local buses to get to the ‘step well’ which was about 16km outside the city. I use ‘Google Transit’ all the time back home and by back home I mean throughout Europe. Just pop in your destination and it sends you to the nearest bus stop. You probably know how it works, but in India? Wow! Look, the buses you need to catch and the exact spot to catch it - another bus station, one we’d missed. When we arrived at what we thought to be the location of the Google bus station, we were reassured at first. It was certainly on the bus route, as there were plenty of buses flying by. Some even had numbers that Google recommended. Bus station? We were at least three times around the ‘Mirzapur Road Triangle’; stopping, waiting and looking on each cycle. The ‘bus station’ had evidently disappeared, we couldn’t even recognise a bus stop and all the buses that passed travelled in the middle of the three lanes of traffic, we saw no way of stopping any bus. We decided to head for that bus station we’d seen before, and luckily it was still where we had remembered it to be.
Now we were in much more familiar territory, much more reassuring. As mentioned, island after island, with row after row of what were unmistakably bus stops. Strangely, however, there weren’t that many buses and those that were there didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Also, none of them had numbers we could recognise. We needed local expertise. That seemed easy enough to find. Each island had a small office, none of them actually manned in the sense of having someone sitting in them, but there was one with a huddle of men around the door, even a man who had what could indistinctly pass for a uniform.
We had already decided, with Google’s help, that we needed the ‘82sh’ bus. I know, that sounds like we wanted the ’82-ish’ bus, which sounds like a bus that may or may not be going in a particular direction. Never mind, with our faith in Google we asked where we could get the ‘82sh’ bus. Now, I am not sure if our question was understood, but the reply was unequivocal: ‘Where are you going?’ I’m not sure if it’s a hangover from the Delhi/Jaipur days, but it was only with great reluctance that we surrendered that information, but we needn’t have worried these people weren’t trying to hijack us, well not in that Delhi/Jaipur sense, but you have to realise there is still a very real sense that it’s not just information you are surrendering. You are surrendering your control of the situation and from now you are going to have to put all your faith in this stranger.
Even the slightest enquiry, just clarification that we both understand each other, is met with an incomprehensible ‘reply’. It’s not just language, it’s a whole set of cultural norms, metalinguistic gestures and your own complete ignorance. Every new question is now met with a hand gesture that I am gradually coming to ‘understand’. It’s a raised palm with open fingers, waved gently forwards and downwards in a gesture that could either mean ‘just wait here’, or it’s a gentle reminder to ‘calm down, we’ve got it sorted’. It’s not a comforting gesture for those of little faith. In the end our trustee turns out to be the conductor of the bus standing opposite and he leads us there and even tells us where to get off and where to catch our connecting bus. Even with such a positive outcome, I still hanker after a reply that just involves pointing to the bus we need.
During that journey we also learnt so much more about our difficulties and our ignorance. We even learnt to recognise a bus stop and how to use it. Soon after leaving the proper bus station, we passed the ‘Google bus station’. Now, as our bus slowed, we could clearly see a ‘Bus Stop’. At ground level all we saw were unbroken rows of parked motorcycles, scooters and Tuk-Tuks, but from here with the cue of the bus slowing, the bus stop just popped out at us. I use the term bus ‘stop’ reservedly. Buses don’t stop, they only slow down and they don’t even slow down uniformly every time. I’m not sure, perhaps it’s the traffic, or perhaps the driver sees how many people are about to get on and judges how slow he needs to go to allow that number of people to board. That also explains the scarcity of buses in the station. Even there they seem to hardly stop, inching along whilst the hoards push on. The few that, like ours, are hanging around are probably just there because the driver’s on his break. Anyway, back to our scheduled bus trip bringing us to Ahmedabad.
There appear to be no intercity bus stations like the ones for municipal buses. There are only pick-up points and since we had found out where ours was, we arranged ourselves a Tuk-Tuk for the morning with plenty of time to get us there. We left it to the driver to take us. I now know that but for him we would never have made that bus.
He knew as little as us about the bus we wanted to take, but unlike us at least he had a handle on the language. The area we got to, with the information we had, was a seemingly massive road interchange. It was probably just a road junction, but instead of two roads crossing, we could only see four roads meeting. Each of these roads had two carriageways, but each carriageway had at least three lanes of traffic and an outer and inner squeeze lane for scotters and bikes. I can’t begin to truly paint the picture, but our driver pulled up and stopped and asked, jumped back in and crossed the five lanes of traffic, including the squeeze lanes. Its hard to say now if any two lanes on the this carriageway were actually travelling in the same direction, it’s impossible to stop yourself trying to impose a structure where there is none. Onto another carriageway and next… I say next, but in fact none of this appeared to happen sequentially at the time. So next, he then joined what we now saw was the single carriageway four lane roundabout (ignore the notional Google arrows indicating the flow of traffic) and chose to go contraflow in one of the ‘lanes’ to get to one of the other joining four lane carriageways. We were no longer in the ‘Mirzapur Road Triangle’ but the BAPS Circle. Dante came to mind.
Finally, he found the bus office, I know that we never could have. But our ordeal wasn’t yet over.
As we said, you cannot rely on the livery to identify the bus you will be travelling on, instead the name of the company will be painted along the side, usually in the form of a web address, just to make it that little bit more difficult. Buses from our company came and went, but we couldn’t see any identifiable destination. We approached each bus emblazoned with the correct web address. Some stopped for anything between 10 seconds and two minutes. Some even disgorged passengers, but they all refused us. We were greeted by many of those hand gestures, some conveying rather more frustration than what little comfort we’d previously associated that gesture with. I had never thought of gestures as having different intonations.
When our bus finally did arrive, it was a rather more luxurious affair than our last one and after a very comfortable ride we found ourselves in Ahmedabad.
