around the world in 180 days

24 hours ago, our plane was landing at the Delhi airport and we’ve already experienced so much that I’m not even sure where to begin.
We were greeted at the airport last night by a man holding that always-comforting placard with our names on it. We climbed into an ordinary white sedan with him and a driver and got our first taste of driving in India, which is quite different from anywhere else we’ve been and also quite terrifying, if you allow yourself to think about it too much.
Traffic in India is impossible to explain. It’s just too crazy, too crowded and bizarre to discribe, but I’ll try to give you a small taste.
The first thing we noticed is the honking. In India, people believe that a car has a horn for a reason: to be used. And so they do, constantly. A horn can mean hello, I’m passing, get out of the way, or any number of other things.
The second thing we noticed is that, while there are lines painted on the roads just like everywhere else, these lines apparently have no meaning in India. Maybe they’re just decorations, or something the British put there that India decided to ignore after independence. I’m not sure. Traffic in India reminds me of the halls at a school between classes: all of the vehicles are crammed together in a crowd, and they all jostle and honk and nudge their way forward.
Another thing we noticed is that cars aren’t the only thing on the road. Anna counted 18 things besides cars on the road, including regular things like trucks and tractors and small taxis called auto-rickshaws and not so regular things like cos and camels and elephants.
Anyway, we survived the ride from the airport, arriving in a neighborhood rundown enough to make me say “please let our hotel be somewhere else” to myself over and over again. The hotel itself didn’t do much to inspire confidence either. It was old and dingy and the beds made us wonder of we would wake up with strange bites. We didn’t give it too much thought before we fell asleep.
The world changes with a good night’s sleep. Lucky for us, the world also changes with a crappy night’s sleep, because around dawn (5:30 or so), it sounded like a large group of people were attending a cockfight or a horserace outside our door. I don’t know what was going on, but there were a bunch of people yelling about something–not angry, just excited.
The new day brightened our spirits, though. We are on a three day tour of the so-called golden triangle: Delhi, Jaiput and Agra, where the Taj Mahal is. Today held a tour of Delhi and a drive to Jaipur in store for us and we were ready to get moving. We visited a Hindu temple, much more ornate than anything we saw in Bali, and our guide explained a bit about the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddist religions and how they were related. Next we visited the oldest mosque in India. We ate lunch and were off to Jaipur.
We were on the outskirts of Jaipur when the bus hit us. Anna and I were sitting in the backseat, Mary in the front, and, though we all saw it coming, none of us could say a thing. Everything passes with such a small clearance, that I think we all didn’t believe it would actually hit us, even when it was only inches away. Our driver was passing the bus, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and autorickshaws were all around and the bus just drove into us like we weren’t even there.
The accident was a low-speed collision and no one in either vehicle was injured. Our driver was sure ticked off though, understandably so. The bus had hit us, but the police had taken the bus driver’s side because he was from Jaipur and our driver wasn’t. He pointed at the car and yelled at the bus driver for about 30 mins before he decided to take us to our hotel and finish with the bus driver later. We still haven’t found out how things worked out. I hope things are alright. I feel bad for the driver, he was such a nice guy, it’d be awful if he lost his job or had to pay for the damage himself.
Our hotel tonight is much nicer than the one last night, which is good because we’ll be here for 2 nights.