In an age where carbon dioxide emissions are proven to be the cause of climate change and fossil fuels are considered environmental toxins, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get nostalgic about road trips. But back in his 1960s and early ’70s, when I was a boy, there was still an innocence, and certainly even romance, to getting into a car and heading to the horizon. At that time, India’s highways were not as congested as they are now, and most vehicles could not accelerate beyond 50 miles per hour. (Kilometers are still in the future.) The main roads between cities are only two lanes wide, with large shady trees providing a canopy of green leaves, and at times it feels like you’re passing through a tunnel of leaves. It was very crowded.
Road trips have been a family tradition for us. In the winter of 1933, long before I was born, my grandparents and their four sons traveled through northern India in a Model A Ford with luggage strapped to their backs and strapped to running boards. The following summer, when he was five years old, his father traveled to America for the first time with his parents and siblings. After traveling by steamer from Karachi to Basra, they took a boat up the Euphrates River and hired Nash’s convertible to drive them from Baghdad to Jerusalem. There were no roads along this route, so they joined a caravan of cars across the open desert. After sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean and finally from Genoa to Boston, my grandfather quickly bought a used Willys of his Overland and took his family across the United States to San Francisco.
These trips were supposed to cure my father’s wanderlust, but they actually only made him want to keep driving. Although her mother didn’t have many options, she seemed to enjoy road trips herself. Our first family car was a Landmaster, which we regularly traveled from our home in Eta in the plains of Uttar Pradesh, where my father was posted, to the hills of Mussoorie, where my brother and I went to school. I was there. It was a 12 hour drive to Delhi and we often stayed there overnight before proceeding via Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Roorkee and Dehradun.
If there’s a route on a map etched into my genes, it’s the drive from Delhi to Mussoorie. That said, many of the landmarks I remember are gone and the highway is now 6 or 8 lanes of high-speed traffic. One of our favorite stops along the way where we often had a picnic lunch was on the canal bank next to the bridge at Hatauli. When I was 9 years old or 10 years old, a small restaurant called Cheetal opened at this location and quickly became a popular roadside restaurant.
After the Landmaster was sold, my father’s obsession with internal combustion engines led him to buy a 1954 military salvaged Willys Jeep from a kabaddiwala in Delhi’s second-hand market Motia Khan. We often teased that his father’s optimistic life philosophy was reflected in this Jeep. Everything can be solved! ” He was an excellent mechanic, so the Jeep always needed repairs. Self starter barely worked. My brother and I were asked to turn the crank, which had a terrible habit of buckling like a bad-tempered mule. The fuel gauge also didn’t work, but again the crank helped. I’ll dip it into the gas tank and check the level.
Our family has taken this Jeep on many road trips to places like Kashmir, Kullu and Corbett National Park. We traveled a lot during the summer and school holidays. Of course, there was no air conditioning in the Jeep, but there were also no windows or doors. The canvas roof rolled up to the sides kept the breeze relatively comfortable during the journey. At one point, my father put a makeshift aluminum cover over it to try to protect us from the monsoon rains. The five of us, along with our two cocker spaniels, fit snugly into the Jeep and all our belongings were packed into the trailer.
It took four days to drive from Mussoorie to Kashmir, with overnight stops at Ludhiana, Pathankot and Batote, before finally reaching Pahalgam, where we camped in the meadows for two weeks. The journey was leisurely, often interrupted by railroad crossings, where we had to stop to wait for a train to pass. There were vendors selling cold drinks and snacks, so these delays didn’t bother me too much. There were also regular outages due to flat tires and broken fan belts. Part of our trip was along the Grand Trunk Road, which evoked a sense of history and traced back into the past. Thirty-five years ago, my grandparents drove this route in a Ford. And when we visited America in 1967, my father insisted we drive from New York to California and back again.
Eventually, my brother and I learned how to drive a Jeep on our own through trial and error rather than formal lessons. Sadly, I didn’t inherit my father’s mechanical skills or patience with cars that refused to start. Over the years, I’ve taken several road trips myself, but more often by motorcycle than by car. However, recently I have lost the desire to drive long distances. Maybe it’s because most highways have become featureless concrete ribbons, and you don’t know how many hours the drive will take or what obstacles or detours are ahead. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a sense of adventure. These days, you can simply enter a route into your smartphone and it will tell you where to go and how long it will take. The unpredictability and freedom of these journeys is gone.
Steven Alter’s upcoming book, The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage, will be published in February
2 Comments
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I loved you even more than you’ll say here. The picture is nice and your writing is stylish, but you read it quickly. I think you should give it another chance soon. I’ll likely do that again and again if you keep this walk safe.