The Long Drive

Okay, okay so I have to admit Mahesh is right: I've been remiss in updating. But it's a new year and I'm taking it easy. And frankly, I don't know what to write about. (Except for books and speculative fiction. I can never write enough about books and speculative fiction.)

Ah well, I'll tell you what I did for my New Year vacation.

Like JP, I hit the road a day before the New Year, visiting [identity-protected] at her home province. However, unlike JP's trip, it was pretty uneventful. I spent the 1st of January at her place and then the next day, together with her siblings, we took the 10-hour drive home. I like driving and the culmination of any trip to [identity-protected]'s province is the drive back.

The thing about driving on provincial roads is that it's worlds-different from driving in the city. In the city, most of the highways are four- or five-cars wide enough to accomodate the free-wheeling buses that careen all over the place to pick up passengers. On provincial roads (usually designated national highways), there are only two lanes: the one you're on and the counter-lane. So the speed you're on the highway depends on how fast the vehicle before you is going. Unfortunately, you also have to contend with the aforementioned buses-- and trucks. A lot of trucks.

But then again, the trucks aren't so bad really. They're slow so if you have the misfortune of coming up on one, all you have to do is make sure the counter-lane is free in order to overtake. (Poor you if you have to contend with two or three trucks on a zig-zaggy road.) The buses are a problem: they're on a schedule so they move like hell on wheels, overtaking like a gigantic hand of God on your left and moving even faster if you dare try to overtake them. There were times I'd spend an hour or two trying to keep ahead of a bus just so that it wouldn't overtake me.

But once you get the hang of provincial driving, it's all good. Which is why this trip was memorable because of three things:

(1) Overtaking two or three vehicles on a curve while a giant truck was coming our way. That thing was a bit too close for comfort though I must admit I'm more or less a safe driver. However, I must also admit that at the time I overtook the three cars, I was trying to overtake a Honda Civic dressed up like a racing car. I couldn't help it: I have this urge to punish bad driving in other drivers by overtaking them.

(2) The second thing I remember of the trip was throwing a spent cigarette outside my window while driving. Unfortunately, one of [identity-protected]'s sisters had the window open behind me and the lit cigarette butt-- er, was blown straight into where she was sitting. Suffice to say, after I stopped the car, there were a lot of jumping up and down and a lot of apologies.

(3) It was already night time when I almost ran over someone: an idiot biking in the middle of the road (remember, this is a two-lane highway), dressed in dark clothes and without any safety-light to indicate to motorists that he was there. Now it's one thing to bike like that in a middle of a busy highway; it's another to DROP YOUR SHOE AND DECIDE TO SWERVE TO THE RIGHT AS IF THERE WEREN'T CARS COMING YOUR WAY IN ORDER TO PICK IT UP.

No, he did not decide to stop where he was to get his shoe, he had the temerity to get to the side of the road all the way from the middle without even checking behind him to see if there was a car coming up. Thank God I had managed to pick him out out of the middle of the road because his silhouette had shown up against the oncoming traffic's headlights. For a moment though I thought he was going to crash into my car as I swerved to the right to avoid him; I could have sworn he wasn't touching the brake when he made that damn-fool move.

After recovering from a round of screaming on the part of [identity-protected] and her siblings and balls-crawling-to-the-throat on my part, I shakily got another cigarette and smoked my lungs out.

And that's how I spent my New Year vacation.

*wry grin*