When the train that we hoped would be on left without us, and about 10 000 other Indians, things looked grim; and not just the place that we happened to be. Getting to Gorakhpur by bus was not an option - it was 700km away and nothing goes that far in India in a day! The train we had tickets for was going through Lucknow the following night and we needed to be there to catch it! Come hell or high water, that train was getting a complement of two white faces!

But how to get to Lucknow? Bus? Because there is zero travellers and tourist market in this part of Moradadawful, English was not understood and so trying to find out where the bus left from only elicited a wave of the hand and the police asking, "Why no train?" and shaking their heads knowing that westerners are indeed, truly mad!

Come 0500 the next morning, we joined the other 50 000 Indians resorting to the buses on the side of the road and with little luck! Dawn had come and gone and the crowds had thinned, but we still stood there.

"You want taxi?" From across the street was the start of getting us down the 340km, 8hr road later! Fat man wanted 5000, we settled with a lot of head wibble and a wobbling on 3000 (about 25GBP - bargain!) and away we went. Fantastic! And this bloke drove like the clappers! 340km should be over in a few hours! Bring on Lucknow and our train.....the border to Nepal was looking ever nearer!

On a map, National Highway 24 looks like exactly that. But, in reality, it is sadly a little different. It is only single lane road and everybody, and I mean everybody uses it to get from point A to point B in whatever means of transport that they have! The one fantastic thing about travelling on the state buses and trains is that you see how India actually is. People getting on and off buses, what they wear, what they take with them, how they interact and behave. You also see amazing scenes of rural life. One journey we took between Dehra Dun and Rishikesh was 35km on the flat and should have taken 45minutes at the most. Well, the 2hr detour took us through villages and scenes of life straight from the history books. Women in the fields and streets in the wonderfully coloured saris constrasted against villages and fields lent an air of colour and brilliance otherwise lacking and fields filled with all manner of crops in the various stages of harvest. Many of the road users we encountered on NH24 and elsewhere were farmers moving their produce from point of production to point of process. Everywhere the farming took place, we felt like intruders in time in our insulated bus bubble as we thunder passed!

But any road journey in India is a very hazardous undertaking! There are numerous obstacles that any driver needs to overcome in order to get to his destination successfully, and alive! The sheer volume of traffic is immense. In one place we drove on the shoulder of the road past, at least 10km of trucks backed up nose to tail. We estimated that in that traffic jam alone, there were well over 1000 trucks!

The horns that the drivers use constantly, and to no avail, start to become background and blend into the noise of every road. If you are not overtaking trucks, buses, motorcycles, rickshaws, bicycles and bullock carts piled to the rooftops with farm produce, then you are getting overtaken by anything bigger and faster than you. And whatever is bigger and faster always wins, even if they are coming the opposite way! In another western country, this sought of driving would have the courts filled with transgressors. Here, big and fast always wins! Trying to get through a town or a village meant negotiating the add cannibalised truck wreck from long past and the daily market that lined the roads! I kid you not, the locals had put out their bits and pieces not more than 3feet from my side of the car as we headed through their towns! And this is NH24!

I think that our driver's sense of arrogance and misguided sense of spatial awareness meant that we only had two very near misses! It is not often I hear Ing swear like a trooper - even I was impressed by what came out after we escaped the second near-miss! Not bad in a 340km, 8hr journey! Brilliant! But only to be "enjoyed" once in your life. It was like Cannonball Run out there on NH24!

Arriving at Lucknow station was a happy time indeed! Food, a bed in the dorm in one of the retiring rooms and a train out of here tonight! Happiness doesn't come better than that!