Wacky Races Commuting

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog front recently so I’d better do something to rectify that.

We have the luxury of a car at our disposal to get to and from work, and for other trips too. We tell the right person at work what time we want to be picked up tomorrow, and she contacts the car firm who send a driver. They’re not big Toyota Innovas (people carrier 7-seaters) like we had in Delhi (which were great for getting a good view over traffic, and also remember the “might is right” rule of the road: people got out of our way in an Innova): but comfortable and modern enough – they have air conditioning of course. We’ve learned to spot “our” car at the hotel, because the car firm have decided to put the car registration number on the side of the car too, which is distinctive. We also don’t have the consistency of the same driver and car each day, so the method that I used last time of tipping the driver at the end of the week won’t work this time. Each of the three of us gave our driver Rs200 last weekend, but apart from that we’ve not been tipping so far, and I think it is probably expected that we should do so. I gave the driver Rs100 tonight (about £1.30) as he’d taken us out on a special trip to a shopping mall (of which more another time).

Anyway, our daily commute. As the senior British Gas manager on site (ha ha! That will no doubt change soon [in fact it has, today! A nice surprise]) I feel a certain responsibility for making sure that we’re doing suitable shifts, that fit in with the business needs. Anyway, there’s not much decision making to do at the moment, as those people here so far seem happy to do a fairly flexible shift. Next week will need to be more “defined” as training starts en masse with many groups getting under way. As long as everyone works their contracted 37 hours a week, it hasn’t really mattered which hours those are. Is it best to align with UK business hours, or to do a shift that covers most trainees/trainers shifts here, or something else? I’ve been getting in about 11am IST (6.30am BST) so that I can finish around 7pm, after the Review of the Day with one group.

So, what I was trying to say was, that we generally leave the hotel about 10.15 am. Not always at this time (there have been a couple of days with bad traffic or mix-ups), but it seems to be settling into a good routine now. One day we left at the normal time and then got stuck in a total traffic jam right outside the hotel for about 30 minutes. Totally solid. But the next day, we left at the same time and the road was clear! The traffic jam came later. There’s no predictability. We’ve just got in at about 10pm, and the traffic was as busy as it was at 7.30pm some days.

We are getting to know the route well, although we only see it once a day really as it’s dark when we come home (sun sets about 7pm as I said before – or later, depending on which order you read these entries in).

We leave the hotel onto quite a nicely maintained road. There are proper pavements, and a pretty row of trees and flowers down the middle. This can be gridlocked though as there’s a big junction up ahead that doesn’t appear to have working lights all the time, so sometimes our road has to just wait and wait and wait until the pressure reaches critical mass and we flow out into the traffic on the main road and stop it by sheer force of numbers. Or something like that – it’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening as it seems as if the drivers communicate by telepathy (or perhaps it’s horn sonar).

Then we drive for a km or so along quite a good wide road, with a decent road surface and proper shops along the sides. At the place we turn off is the restaurant we went to on our first Sunday night; Mainland China. We paid about Rs400 to take a cab from our hotel, have it wait for us then take us back (not a hotel car which would have been about Rs1000 for a couple of hours).

The road for the next couple of kms is a bit less well maintained, and the shops on either side are more temporary. The sides of the road are often big piles of earth and ditches. There are loads of things to look at though. Just today I spotted a great sign on a gate: “No parking here. Tyres will be inflated”. !!! A whole range of possible meanings. Did they get the sign wrong (tyres will be deflated instead), or will they inflate them so much they burst. Or are the two points unconnected and the premises offers a tyre-inflating service inside (so don’t park outside). I also like the municipal works signs that say, “inconvenience is regretted” on road works warnings. Wonderfully phrased.

There are lots of bits of the road that deteriorate rapidly from “quite smooth and easy driving” to “get me a 4x4 offroader now please”. It looks as if they just get bored with laying the road surface and just leave it as rubble or earth, until they get round to filling in the last bit. But they’ll paint the kerbs in pretty white paint.

We turn off this road and bump our way onto a bit of Highway, for a short way anyway. It looks as if we’re driving on something that is in the middle of being constructed, but they’ve decided to let traffic on anyway. There are no lights on the works, and you’re likely to encounter random chunks of concrete seemingly in the middle of the road; but the good news is that it seems to have been like this for a while and the drivers all know the road really well so they go around them.

There’s a nice view of a lake from this road: the driver stopped to let me take photos, which was nice.

I took this picture of an auto rickshaw driver (Phil got told off at work by the trainees for calling them tuk-tuks; apparently that’s a Thai name and they are not called that in India) so you can see that they all drive barefoot, and it’s basically a scooter controls with a big body attached. Most of the drivers have some sort of good luck charm (I suppose) hanging around their windscreen or wrapped around the steering column. They also have a meter which there’s some complicated formula for working out how much you pay: I think it’s something like “take Rs1 off what it says on the meter but the meter measures in 10s so if it says 140 on the meter then you pay Rs13…” but I could be wrong. I’ve not been in one yet! Still! Maybe this weekend.

After a while we turn off this road and into the posh bit of town. Here, there are no holes in the road, the pavements are clean and clearly defined, there are nice trees along each road and there are paved speed bumps every 100 yards or so to keep the speed down. The buildings around here are tall and clean (not slightly grubby / covered in algae / falling down / being built like in the rest of the city) and there aren’t any shacks at all. I saw a couple of signs for the companies that are based here, e.g. Colgate Palmolive India, so they are obviously putting money into the whole area.

Strangely, or perhaps inevitably, immediately after this smart part, comes a really poor slum area. You go through a small barrier (designed to stop lorries / buses going this way) and then up a bit of a hill, and suddenly the road becomes a tiny narrow bumpy road with slums crawling up the hill. I haven’t got any clear illustrative photos of this yet as I was on the wrong side of the car. Maybe another day.

Then the road opens out and the driver puts his foot down. Nearly there! Downhill! Beep beep! Out of my way! At the bottom of the hill we turn right (although there’s another office in the other direction – I’ve not been there yet) and then in a minute or so we turn into the drive for the big new office. It’s not got our work on every floor, we just have people on a couple of them. As visitors, we are taken to the visitors’ entrance, get out of the car to no obvious signs, and get in the lift to floor 1.

Marble-faced security guards sign us in (even though we now have door passes, we still have to type our details into the computer, and hand in cameras etc. for safe storage) and that’s the end of our commute. On a good day (like today) it takes about half an hour. On a bad day (like yesterday) the driver was late picking us up (45 mins) and then it took about another 45 mins to get in.

It can get quite stomach-churning if you’re in the car with a keen driver: he’s always pushing forwards to get a position advantage, then braking suddenly to avoid an auto-rickshaw or a bus or something. I find it quite tough if I’m in the back seat. Bring travel sickness meds, perhaps!

A little bit different from a ride on the number 14 LRT bus. Or my quiet bike ride along Ferry Road Path. But there's so much to see, and it's different every day (same route, different people!). Someone asked me if we count the travel time as working hours (i.e. start work when we leave the hotel): the answer is definitely no! Wacky Races is not like working!