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Terrain, regulations and construction guidelines for roads in other countries are different from those in the US. As a result, the experience of driving in another country is often fairly interesting and certainly unlike driving back at home.
For me, sharing the streets in a major city with motorcycles with 5 people on them, elephants, cows, bikes, buses and rickshaws was outrageous in India (Chennai, mostly). I've never experienced anything like it.
The twisting mountain roads in the Western Ghats in India were narrow and scary with sheer cliffs on either side. Sure enough, we witnessed a bus crash and a lot of people were hurt. The scariest that I've personally driven where some of the mountain roads in St. Lucia. They're incredibly narrow and high up too. To make matters worse, the driver sits on the right and my car was a standard (I'm fine w/ manual transmission, but it was weird sitting on the right).
The craziest roads I've traveled on were the ones under direct sniper observation and/or pre-zeroed artillery.
But, in a "usual" sense, the streets of Port au Prince come first to mind. What a madhouse of pedestrians, cars, tap-tap's and garishly decorated trucks! No speed limits, no controls and when someone wants to pass, he beeps his horn. Not to get your permission, of course, but as a warning that he's coming around anyhow and you'd better find a place to go!
Not as crazy as anything mentioned before me, but the most "adventurous road" I've ever driven is in the Dolomites in northern Italy, running between Val D'Ega and Cortina d'Ampezzo. It's called "Grande Strada dei Dolomiti" or "the Great Dolomite Road"....SS 48. Though it feels like you are in Switzerland, you are clearly in Italy. It is 50 to 60 miles of passing through picturesque towns and mountain switchbacks. It takes about 2.5 to 3 hours to complete this drive. Guarantee: dozens of postcard views en route.
Last edited by robertpolyglot; 04-04-2012 at 10:53 PM..
Terrain, regulations and construction guidelines for roads in other countries are different from those in the US. As a result, the experience of driving in another country is often fairly interesting and certainly unlike driving back at home.
For me, sharing the streets in a major city with motorcycles with 5 people on them, elephants, cows, bikes, buses and rickshaws was outrageous in India (Chennai, mostly). I've never experienced anything like it.
The twisting mountain roads in the Western Ghats in India were narrow and scary with sheer cliffs on either side. Sure enough, we witnessed a bus crash and a lot of people were hurt. The scariest that I've personally driven where some of the mountain roads in St. Lucia. They're incredibly narrow and high up too. To make matters worse, the driver sits on the right and my car was a standard (I'm fine w/ manual transmission, but it was weird sitting on the right).
What are your experiences?
Any road that my friend is driving on and I am riding, she scares the buggers out of me.......LOL
I've been both ways over the famous "road of death" in Bolivia.
I've walked across a street in Hanoi.
I got picked up hitchhiking on a mountain road in southern Italy by a guy who had just had a fight with his wife and mother in law.
I drove 90 miles from Bangor to Calais Maine in the middle of a winter night, with my headlights turned off, just by the light of the full moon on the snow, which was a transcendentally awesome experience. (Did not meet a single car coming the other way.)
I drove a car without AC 800 miles across Saudi Arabia in the daytime in summer. I drove to that road, escorted to two truckers, who navigated 100 miles of roadless desert by the stars and pulled me out of the sand a couple of times.
The first time I drove into Istanbul, there were 4 or 5 lanes of traffic each way and no lane markings, everyone for himself, and they were all Turkish drivers except me.
I've been both ways over the famous "road of death" in Bolivia.
I've always been fascinated by that road. Was it as terrifying as the footage makes it out to be?
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I drove 90 miles from Bangor to Calais Maine in the middle of a winter night, with my headlights turned off, just by the light of the full moon on the snow, which was a transcendentally awesome experience. (Did not meet a single car coming the other way.)
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I went to college in Maine and did the same thing from Skowhegan to Jackman (en route to Quebec City). Very cool experience (however, I passed a handful of tractor trailer trucks along the way).
I've always been fascinated by that road. Was it as terrifying as the footage makes it out to be?
The downhill way to Coroico is the scariest. Traffic switches over and drives on the left on that road, so the drivers can open their door and hang out to see the left front wheels, and make sure they don't go over the side, so the downhill traffic is next to the precipice. Going back uphill to LaPaz is pretty humdrum. Nobody in my minivan seemed very concerned about it, and in fact, I had never heard of the reputation of the road before I traveled on it (that was the pre-Internet era), so to me it was just another South American bus trip. But I did notice that the driver was a little less cavalier and nonchalant about the drive, compared to the drivers of other white-knuckle bus trips in the Andes.
I've heard that a new road has been built, so this road is not used anymore.
Oh, I have another one, I forgot to mention. Crossing the border from Ecuador into Peru, there had been floods, and the water was knee deep in the town on the Peru side of the border, and there had been no onward buses for several days, but the day we were there, the water had gone down enough that the bus departed for Lima. Some miles into Peru, we had to go through high water at some river crossings, where a bridge had been washed out, and the bus scraped bottom and broke the brake lines. The driver got out and made an emergency fix with a pair of vice grips, and we continued on, but the brakes finally went out completely. He continued to drive about 4 hours at moderate speeds using only the engine as a brake, as far as Chiclayo, where he drove through the city, just shutting off the engine while in gear when he needed to stop. At the bus terminal in Chiclayo, after a couple hours wait, there was another Lima bus leaving, already full, so all the passengers from our bus just packed into the other bus at about 2 am, with 30 or 40 people standing in the aisles, but at least the bus (probably) had brakes. Throughout the whole night, not a single passenger complained.
I think the difference between a Tourist and a Traveler, is that a tourist would say "It was a terrible trip, we had to ride all night in a bus with no brakes." A traveler would say "It was a wonderful trip, we had to ride all night in a bus with no bakes."
I was on another bus in Bolivia that ran out of spare tires. In the middle of nowhere, the drivers had to get out a knife and cut one tire into pieces, to glue into another tire as a boot, to keep us going to a place where a replacement tire could be found. And also in Bolivia, the fuel pump went out in a bus, and a passenger had to hold up a can of gas with a piece of hose, to gravity-feed gas into the carburetor until we got to town. Luckily, for all their homicidal driving defects, South American bus drivers are very resourceful.
I was on a city bus in the center of Bangkok that was in an accident, and all the passengers, without a word, simply picked up their belongings and got off the bus and walked away. Another bus I was on, in Paraguay, went through a spot checkpoint, where it was found that the driver was carrying 500 pounds of sugar smuggled in from Brazil, and the bus was confiscated, and the passengers just got out and stood on the road and waited for the next bus. My god, to think what Americans would do if things like that happened on buses.
Mountain road up through (now) Montenegro and Kosovo, from the coast near Dubrovnik, on our way to Greece. Incredible winding mountain roads, some blocked with snow (it was the end of March). Horsemen who looked like gauchos with rifles slung beside them. Small concrete abutments every few yards, many sheared off. Saw a car, a new one with no rust, upside down at the bottom of a canyon. We were very glad to get to Greece.
Suburban Mumbai, in 2001, north of the downtown, up near the IIT, while they were building all the flyovers to replace the muddy excuses for intersections. Cows wandering around, rocks sitting in the middle of the road, endless mud; the only way to get across was to run, or perch halfway across. Also in Mumbai, driving south back to the city on the main highway, in the dark, with no streetlights, with speed bumps that went straight up like boards, and slum dwellers, on both sides of course, darting in front of the car. Fortunately I was not driving.
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