This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
My driver’s name is Kal, and he will be taking me everywhere I want to go over the next eight days while I tour the southern Indian state of Kerala. Sounds cool, right, to have a private driver to chauffer you around, leaving you stress-free to enjoy the trip? A driver that is also a local guide who can point out interesting sights and activities along the route and explain the background to what you are seeing? A driver who is at your total disposal 24 hours a day?
Yes, but… this is India, where nothing is ever as simple or as easy as it first seems.
You see, having a driver for a multi-day trip means the driver is either with you or waiting for you at all times. He’s there waiting when you spend six hours hiking a trail or visiting an attraction. He’s outside waiting when you’re eating in a restaurant. He’s there waiting when you’re sleeping. In fact, 24 hours a day, he is waiting for you in case you need or desire to be driven somewhere.
I feel awkward and unsure of how to treat this polite and smiling man who has, for all practical purposes, become my newest and closest travel companion. When I eat, he politely refuses to eat with me, even though I plead with him to join me and offer to pay. Instead, he waits in the car or chats with the other drivers. When I am touring an attraction, he waits in his car. When I sleep at night, he sleeps outside my guesthouse—in his car. And it’s not a big car, it’s a little Suzuki sized for narrow Indian roads. He’ll be doing this for the next eight days and nights as I explore the southern Indian state of Kerala.
I worry and wonder about the lifestyle his occupation forces on him. When does he eat? How does he manage to sleep in a tiny Suzuki sedan? When does he shower? Do laundry? Where is his luggage? How does he spend so much time away from his family? I realize that I’m projecting my American-bred egalitarian attitudes on a foreign and very different culture, but I can’t shake the sense of guilt that I’m taking advantage of Kal, or at least a system of privileges that results in his lifestyle.
When I ask, Kal tells me a little about himself. He’s married. He has a young son at home (he shows me a photo on his phone of a beautiful smiling boy). He’s a trained electrician who worked for many years in the Middle East. He’s been a professional driver for the last few years. He insists that driving tourists pays better than working in the trades in India. He tells me that he enjoys meeting his clients and making new friends. He insists that he doesn’t mind sleeping in his car, or waiting for hours while I take a long hike or visit an attraction. He seems a bit amused by my concern.
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When I first starting planning an extended trip to India I thought it would be much like planning a trip to most other places I’ve visited. I hate to use travel agencies and tour operators; I very much prefer to explore on my own, with the freedom of my own car. My normal travel planning routine is to research the destination, head to my bookstore to buy the DK travel book, order a Michelin road map from Amazon, then sit down with a spreadsheet and put a timeline together of lodging, transit, and activities. Then I’ll go online to Kayak.com and spend hours finding the cheapest possible flights, Booking.com to reserve places to stay, and Expedia.com to rent a car. It’s a very organized process I’ve developed over many years and it always works well. Trips to Europe, Africa, Central and South America all proceeded without too many hiccups, so I assumed my planning process was infallible.
With India, though, almost immediately my travel-planning process faltered, crashed and burned. It turns out that India isn’t quite like any of the other places I’ve visited. Yes, I had the guidebook. I’d done tons of Internet research on places to go and things to see; I even went so far as to buy airline tickets and book a few lodgings. However, when it came time to arrange transportation, I hit a brick wall.
My first clue that transportation inside India was different from western countries came from Google maps. When I entered our first two planned destinations to see how long the distance took to drive, the result didn’t make sense. The drive time between the two towns, only 30 kilometers apart (about 18 miles), was two hours, a route that in the U.S. would take 15-20 minutes. Maybe, I reasoned, the puzzling time was the result of some extenuating circumstance, such as a downed bridge or major road closure, so I put in a another route I had planned to drive between Mumbai and a seacoast resort area 300 miles to the south. In the States I could easily make this drive in a little less than five hours. In India, according to Google maps, it takes fourteen hours by car, and even longer by train. The lesson learned? It takes a long, long time to get anywhere by road in India.
Okay, it was a little disconcerting, but hey, I’m an accomplished traveler and driver. I would simply plan-extra time for transit. Next, I went to try and reserve a rental car.
Bam: the brick wall. Nope. Not gonna happen.
Yes, there were a couple of companies that rented cars, but the rates were astronomical, sometimes more than the price of buying the car.
What was going on? As I did more research, I found that every travel blog and guide warned strongly against a westerner attempting to drive in India, using adjectives like perilous, treacherous, and suicidal. The only way to get around by road, the bloggers insisted, was to hire a car with a local driver.
I was resistant to the idea, but okay, fine. So I tried to figure out how to hire a driver and car. It turns out there isn’t really a decent website or app for this. There’s no reputable, centralized company or service you can use to hire cars in different parts of India for different dates. The only way to achieve what I wanted was to arrange the service through a local tour operator.
Argh. I really didn’t want to use a tour operator. My experience with tour operators is that they shoehorn you into a particular tourist experience, forcing you into tourist traps and high-density tourist areas. In other words, they keep you in the safe tourist pack, and insulate you from the real flavor of the place you are visiting. In the past, when planning our own trips, my wife and I always picked destinations far from the popular. We much preferred rural homestays with villagers or farm families over luxury hotels; hiking on remote and hidden jungle trails instead of standing in a long queue for a zipline. We never wanted to be led along a pre-formatted itinerary, instead, we liked to find our own way, get delightfully lost on country roads, and stumble across real-world experiences no tourist would ever find. While the luxury hotel would be very comfortable and the zipline would no doubt be fun, getting stuck trying to ford a jungle river and having the local villagers come and help drag your SUV out of the muck with a couple of mules is much more memorable!
With India, though, this strategy didn’t seem possible. No hired driver would want to take his car into a situation where it might get damaged. On this trip, deciding on a whim to turn down a rutted yak-path leading into a mangrove swamp just wouldn’t be possible.
In the end we found a travel planning service called IndiaSomeday that seemed like a good compromise between a traditional tour operator and a travel agent. The company, led by a group of young and tech-savvy entrepreneurs in Mumbai, helped us plan our itinerary and arranged lodging and transportation—including hiring Kal—and did its best to build our experience around our own personal travel style. While I’m sure that we frustrated them several times with our seemingly outrageous requests, they did a commendable job of helping us understand the realities of travel in India. Were it not for their help, I would never have managed the trip, and I would have never met Kal, my new travel companion.
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It’s a late Monday evening, and as I write this Kal is in his car outside my guesthouse doing who-knows-what to pass the time. And he’s not alone—everyone else staying here has their own driver. Everywhere we stop, there are always other small white sedans, just like Kal’s, driven by professional drivers, just like Kal. Over all of India, there must be thousands of scenes just like this. It’s obviously an accepted aspect of travel in India. The only problem is, no matter how much I try to rationalize it, nothing changes the fact that I am in a comfortable bed and air-conditioned room while my hired driver is outside in the parking lot preparing to sleep in his tiny car.
To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.
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