A few hours after I arrived at my hotel I was ready to go and explore Hyderabad. I have rental car which is a Honda Civic and it came with a driver named Nayeem. I asked Nayeem to take me to Char Minar in the old part the city and we started driving. Even though I was sitting in the back seat I still had at least 10 heart attacks in a the 30 minute ride. After only 5 minutes of driving I had already realized that I could never ever driver here.
I need to capture the driving experience with some pictures but for now I will describe in in words. Basically if your nose is 10cm ahead of the next car, bike or pedestrian then you have the right of way. Pedestrians walk on both side of the street and are go with or against the traffic direction. And occasionally you see them standing in the middle of the street between the lanes. Bikes, and motorcycles drive on either side of you and weir in and out of your way with seemingly random pattern. Only about 10% of them wear helmet. To this mix we should add the autorickashs (the yellow 3 wheel taxi cabs). Everybody honks their horn at each other to announce their intention. I am turning left, watch out I am behind you, move out of my way, go faster/slower, etc, etc.
After about 10 minutes of driving I realized that a car was nearly an inch a way from our car. The driver looked at me then smiled and then reached out of his window and grabbed the door handle to open the door of back seat of my car. He opened the door slightly and shut it closed, smiled at me and my driver, and drove off. All this happened as we where driving at about 30 km/hr. It took me a few more second to realize what happened. I was just shocked.
I has asked the driver to take me to Char minar, which is a historical structure with 4 pliers in the middle of the old city. But after this intense driving experience I just wanted to end the driving as soon as I could. So when the driver pointed out a museum on the way there and offered to stop by for a while I took it and got out of the car on terra ferma.
I was still alive but a few pounds lighter.