Okay, for those who haven't heard it, here's my best story.
The year was 1989. Christian Okoye was running roughshod over the NFL and I was having a bad year. I'd never been out of the country before, so a friend and I decided to go to Kathmandu because it was the most unusual place we could think of.
To get to Kathmandu in those days, you had to fly into India, so we figured we'd wander around there for a while, too. We flew into Bombay, toured that fine city, and then our next stop was a cool place about 250 miles away called Aurangabad. If you ever find yourself in central India, I recommend Aurangabad. It's got cool temples like this:
But I digress. My friend and I were on our way to the airport for the flight to Aurangabad when our guide stopped at a hotel and told us to wait. We didn't know why, but we did. So we sat in a hotel lobby - me, my friend, and about 20 monks - for the entire day. All day, with no idea what was going on. Add me to the picture and it looked like this:
Eventually the guide came back and said that the airlines had gone on strike. So we were stuck. Our options were to wait it out in Bombay, go home, or rent a car and drive to Aurangabad. So we rented a car, despite serious reservations. Our guide looked like a classic Bollywood villain and no one would know where we were.
The car has to come with a driver because that's how India works, and you need one. There's no signage and you're dodging cows, elephants, oxcarts, tuktuks, motorcycles, big trucks, and about a billion pedestrians.
So we take off on a 250-mile journey. Didn't seem like a problem, and it was fine for the first hour or so. Our driver didn't speak English very well, but he knew a little bit, and we were in some native India car that looked like this:
About an hour into the trip we hit the Western Ghat mountains, which I never knew existed. Steep dropoffs, no guardrails, and our driver started drifting off to sleep. Constantly. Which is not a good thing when you're on roads like this:
And the roads were tough, too. In India, bigger vehicles take the right of way, so you have to dodge if big trucks decide to pull into your lane to pass oxcarts. So it's getting dark and our driver is constantly falling asleep at the wheel and big trucks are hurtling toward us, and the only good thing is that the driver is going about ten miles per hour at this point so we can reach up from the back seat and grab the wheel if he starts to go off the road.
We can't drive because we don't have a license, have no idea where we are, and there are soldiers everywhere because the Gandhi clan had just lost power in the recent election. So we put up with this for a while and eventually find ourselves on some completely dark road in the middle of nowhere. We tell the driver to pull over and we'll just sleep in the car.
He tells us no, because we're in bandit territory and we'll get robbed if we stop. Given this unexpected news, we elect to keep driving, even though at this point we're cruising along at walking speed and going off the road constantly. It turned out that our driver had been driving for 24 hours straight before he picked us up.
He hits some mud hut village and says that we can sleep in the car there, then promptly passes out. We're sitting in the car and there's a mud hut bar across the road and it's got a bunch of really scary drunk dudes who are really checking out our car. They keep coming over and urinating next to it and looking in at us. We decide to sleep in shifts, and after about an hour an army truck rolls by and unleashes the biggest backfire ever right next to our car. That is not a good thing when you're already on edge.
We were convinced that the bar thugs had located a musket or something, so we wake the driver up and say, "Go. Now."
So our journey continued. We ran a motorcycle completely off the road, drove through a spilled wreck from an overturned tanker truck, which I hope was carrying water because it sure looked like we were driving through gasoline to me, and generally were scared to death the whole time.
And then we have a flat tire. By some miracle we have a spare, so we jump out and change it quickly since, you know, we're still in bandit territory. Keep in mind that we have no idea where we are. We get back in and the driver says that we have to repair the tire because we'll likely have another one given the conditions of the road.
So we pull into another mud hut village and stop. These villages have homeless people all over, so when we stop and get out we draw a crowd of onlookers. The tire repair dude comes out of one of the huts with a bunch of folding chairs and everyone sits in a big circle around the tire and shoots the breeze in Hindi while the tire is fixed. At this point it's about 3 in the morning.
We get back in the car, and four hours later hit the wondrous hotel in Aurangabad, where we're two of only about a dozen guests due to the airline strike. The others were all stranded Japanese who were already there when the strike hit. The drive took about twelve hours overnight to go 250 miles and the entire time we thought we were going to be killed by either a head-on crash, driving off a mountain, blowing up in a pool of gasoline or good old-fashioned murder.
But Aurangabad was really cool.