A Short Road Trip

The trip to Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh gave us an opportunity to assess local traffic conditions and compare them with Morocco; we had been told driving was much worse here and we needed a driver, well certainly we would not have found or way without one as there seem to be more roads to choose from. Otherwise they are not dissimilar save for the complete absence of donkeys and mule carts. They drive on the left here, mostly, and there is no lane precedence so you can overtake on either side but must sound the horn first. The lorries are more prettily decorated with exhortations on their tailgates to "Sound Your Horn". As there are no donkeys the tree of fodder or firewood progressing down the road will be on a woman's head rather than a cart and the object approaching you the wrong way in the fast lane of the motorway will be a tractor or another car.
In the town the donkeys are replaced by motorbikes and scooters and wandering cows (which wander on the motorwat too). Not the 50cc monkey bikes of Taroudant but proper hondas with fast engines. They also swerve around pedestrians and traffic but at high speed which makes them quite scary. They do not slow their speed as they are about to run into a pedestrian just sound their horn and expect you to leap out of the way. That being said the only accident I observed was someone sliding on an oil slick in the middle of a multi-lane city road. Yesterday morning the town was full of schoolchildren in oldfashinoned 1950s style posh-school uniforms zooming around on brand new scooters which seems oneup from the bikes in Taroudant or the schoolrun in Hawarden.
Generally Rajasthan seems much more prosperous and developed than southern Morocco and there is much less sense of it being a developing country. That said there is a much greater disparity between the middle class and the poor, in Morocco however poor their hovels there is no sense of people regularly sleeping on the streets whereas here whole families live their lives on pavements.
The trip had its Kodak moments, the buffalo water wheel for irrigation and the road to Ranakpur lined with troops of monkeys, most of them sunning themselve on the conrete crash barriers that side the road. Coming back the driver stopped for chai and the sky was so friendly with small white clouds in blue sky that we snapped it for the railway enthusiast and then got home into to sit in our window and watch the sunset.