Commentary/Rajeev Srinivasan

The romance of the open road

I have been travelling rather a lot lately. Some of this was literally on the road, in particular driving at breakneck speeds on German autobahns. I wish I could say I had a bright-red BMW or Porsche convertible, wind in my hair and all that, but alas, they were a tad expensive to rent. But even in a clunky little Kia Nexia (no, I hadn't heard of it before either) one feels quite adventurous when driving at 200 kmph.

There is a certain romance to the open road, of course. The freedom of wide-open vistas, of being footloose and fancy-free, of infinite possibilities. Somehow quintessentially American. Or maybe it is just Anglo-Saxon -- after all the British are famed, if eccentric, travellers too. Perhaps Americans travel to explore their vast continent; and the British to escape their miserable weather.

Road trips seem to lend themselves to reminiscences. Jack Kerouac's On the Road was the archetypal account of the American fascination with highways; William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, an evocative account of the less-travelled backroads. And of course Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the anthem for the philosophers of the asphalt.

It appears that one's companion is key, too. John Steinbeck journeyed with Charlie, a dog; R L Stevenson preferred a donkey; and Graham Greene wrote affectionately of his Travels with my Aunt, who, if I remember right, turned out to be really his mother. Good company can make all the difference. I remember with nostalgia train trips with assorted schoolmates -- Paramu, Srikumar, Jacob, Fatso, Narayan.

But enough of trains; we're talking roads here. I drove ten years ago from New York to San Francisco. I packed all my belongings into my little pick-up truck, brand-new and bought expressly for this purpose. And then I set off, pointed due west on Interstate 90, that continent-wide route from Boston to Seattle. I would visit friends in Chicago and Minneapolis before heading southwards.

I had planned out my route with care, and had made reservations at small motels along the way: I couldn't dawdle, but had to be in San Francisco in two weeks. It was mid-September, and there was a chill in the air. Tourist season was over, and so I got excellent rates -- $20 a night, sometimes.

As soon as you leave behind the urban centres of the eastern United States, the vastness of the country overwhelms you. In the plains states, there is endless prairie and cornfields stretching to the horizon. There is little to break the monotony except the mysterious billboards that for a hundred miles invite you to visit Wall Drug, in the town of Wall, North Dakota (I think). Of course I stopped, just out of curiosity. It was nothing particularly exotic, sadly.

I had resolved to stop at all the National Parks I could possibly visit. The most surprising of the lot was the Badlands National Park in the Dakotas. An eerie moonscape of rocks and canyons, I chanced upon it at dusk. In the pinks and reds of the setting sun, the badlands were in their element: the colours of the sunset reflected the pastel shades of the cliffs.

Of course the best was Yellowstone National Park. The geyser Old Faithful spouted hot water at the appointed hour, surrounded by early snow. And I saw a lumbering old American buffalo up close. He walked along the road, with his massive and threatening head, his brown winter coat thick and matted, fierce little bloodshot eyes, and an air of dignity and determination. Rather like a giant of a man, a basketball star, that I once ran into.

The American buffalo -- or is it bison? -- is a protected animal within park boundaries. The once almost-limitless herds were decimated a century ago by white settlers partly as a deliberate policy to starve the native Americans, and partly for 'sport'. Yellowstone has one of the largest remaining herds, numbering some 3,600. Unfortunately, this year, as many as a third have been killed, both by an especially severe winter, and by ranchers fearing them to be carriers of a bovine disease.

After Yellowstone I drove steadily south-west-wards: I needed to switch to another continent-spanning highway, Route 80, that cuts diagonally across the country from New York to San Francisco.

Somewhere in there came the climb over the Rockies. My trusty steed -- I should have named her Rosinante -- balked. When fully laden, the pickup's little 2.0 litre engine just couldn't cut it. We crawled up the long, steep inclines, suffering the ignominy of being passed by huge 32-wheel container trucks. I worried about overheating; but fortunately we managed without incident.

At last I reached the Continental Divide, the line beyond which rivers start flowing westwards to the Pacific. It was snowing up there, and I was astonished to see a couple of bicyclists -- clearly long-distancers with folded-up tents in their panniers -- inching their way up the slopes. Odd characters, I thought. But later my intrepid friend Raghavendra Rao would do the same thing, which confounded me no end.

Last year Rao rode his bicycle all the way from San Francisco to Boston, all by himself, with no support infrastructure whatsoever, 4,000 miles in 40 days! That must be the absolute road trip, experiencing and smelling and photographing the country, and I wish Rao would write a book about his adventure. I was quite certain he would perish on the way, out of sheer exhaustion. But he survived, and in fact, he plans to do it again -- this time to Chicago. Unfathomable, indeed.

Leaving the fearless bicyclists behind, I continued further west through Utah's great desert country, and then mountainous Nevada, finally reaching California through the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Pass has a gruesome history -- this is where, in the 1840s, a migrant party heading for the coast got lost. Snowbound, they had to resort to cannibalism to survive.

I finally reached the Pacific at the Golden Gate. After a couple of days, I continued down slow, beautiful coastal Route 1, one of the most scenic roads in the world. On one side are sheer cliffs or beaches leading to the water's edge. On the other, stands of redwood, or gnarled, windswept cypresses, or fields of asparagus or alfalfa -- this is coastal farmland, Steinbeck country. I drove down Route 1 to Los Angeles and San Diego and then briefly down into Mexico's Baja California.

That leisurely drive was in sharp contrast to my recent sallies on German autobahns. Speed is the essential difference -- in Germany you drive to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. Leaving Frankfurt, I drove through the gently rolling hills of Westphalia -- which looked like the English countryside. Farmland, interspersed with forest and hedgerows -- most soothing; much more tamed than the wild California coast.

The German rules of the road are simple -- there is no speed limit on the autobahn in most places. You go as fast as you dare, or as fast as your car will go. But even if you are going at 180 kmph, you learn that those big Mercedes-Benzes can zoom up in your rear-view mirror astonishingly quickly, so you tend to keep out of the fast lane. My little car could not sustain 200 kmph for long even if I floored it, and it is rather stressful. So I drove at 120 kmph (a mere 75 mph) much of the way.

And then a brief trip to Hong Kong. I write this sitting on the 40th floor of a hotel lounge, having afternoon tea, overlooking Hong Kong's vast deep-water port. Behind the hotel is Victoria's Peak, hidden today in a light fog. In front of me, ocean-going craft steam towards the docks. A tug tows what looks like a large crane. There is the mournful cry of a foghorn. Ferries crisscross the calm grey-green waters. A helicopter buzzes past like a giant dragonfly.

There must be a hundred ships and boats trailing white wakes. Even the laden container ships are moving rather fast, although from this distance they all look like Lego toys. A soaring, solitary kite, or perhaps a sea eagle, lazily rides the thermal updrafts. Maybe now that I know someone here -- my Malaysian friend Shivashankar now lives here -- I might even like Hong Kong a little.

Not so bad, all this being on the road. But I look forward to returning home tomorrow. Home. Only San Francisco and Kerala make me feel that way. As Shakespeare put it, "... my home of love: if I have ranged, like him that travels, I return again."

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