Alleys and Side Streets

Since I leave for work at about 7:00 and start between 7:30 and 8:00, I usually leave before everyone else. Tuesday I worked a little later. I was working with Harish and didn't call my driver in time. I have to call him with an hour advance in order to get a ride when I want to. I like to leave around 5:00 or 5:15. I didn't call util 5:00 on Tuesday night. On Monday it took about 45 minutes for the driver to arrive. I thought it would take the same on Tuesday.

I went out to the gate at around 5:45 and he wasn't there. One of the guards went to see if a driver from the Le Meridien hotel was out among the waiting drivers. He wasn't. He told me to go wait in the lobby of the main building so I did. He called me at about 6:10 so my driver and I dodged the cars, rickshaws, mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, finally arriving at his car.

Traffic is worse at 6:00 than at 5:00. It is worse at 7:00 than 6:00. Eight is even worse. It was after 6:00 and we began encountering jam after jam in each intersection. When my driver noticed a jam, he would divert to a side street and race down until he came to a parallel street to the one we were on. Then we would merge back into traffic and be a bit farther down the road than where we started.

Sometimes we would go down very narrow alley ways. Other cars would be doing the same, even in the opposite direction. At one point we were trying to enter a one lane alley, a car was coming out, we had a car behind us honking at us, and another car was coming up the street we were trying to leave. My driver was trying to backup to let the car come out of the alley, the car behind us didn't want to back up, and the car in the alley couldn't exit the alley due to traffic on the street we were on. It was almost a deadlock situation. Fortunately, there were several spare centimeters between our car and the car exiting the alley so they were able to manuver.

We finally got back to the hotel safely. The total trip was over an hour and I really got to see some of the city I would otherwise have missed. Some fairly nice places down some of those alleys. I probably could never find them again, even if I wanted to try.