Kanpur to Lucknow: Following someone else`s car in a fog

There are instances of trips by road which leave you more than amused, surprised and then totally wondering years after they have ended. Also in the same grave or near death instances where you count your stars and be thankful that you are saved just in the nick of time and here is a small description of a brief trip and talk with my childhood friend and how we both escaped death as well as navigating our vehicle following someone else’s car. 

The distance between Kanpur Lucknow is said to be roughly 80 km and it’s just a bit more than that and the strap happened in the December 2016. Tungesh, my childhood friend was returning from Delhi by by road and the while crossing Kanchanaburi is me whether I was willing to go to Lucknow? I said yes, he gave me a destination to reach from wearing would pick me up and I waited. It was a cold, foggy night in Kanpur around 9 AM where visibility was playing havoc so I had shared my GPS location through whatsapp and reached me following that. 

The real fun started just after Unnao, around 20 km ahead of Kanpur where we witnessed a massive traffic jam or jams one after the other should I say.. He started playing rally car where he started cutting through jam by driving the hatchback on whatever off-road piece of dirt he could find and I became the navigator of the game Colin Mc Rally where being on the passenger side and started giving him directions and visibility instructions in regards to obstacles so that he might navigate easily. The conditions treacherous because there was no confirmed pattern of visibility - you could easily see for 600 m and then suddenly in a span of 10 seconds there was fog where your visibility was barely 50 m. We did not have the advantage of any fog lights. Once we got into a jam, we noticed a Maruti Gypsy with a blue beacon on the top and decided to follow it as the so-called VIP vehicle might find way through the jam by blaring its horn and beacon and we would follow suit. 

All we both needed was just clear road as we were fed up of navigating through jams. Our strategy worked partially because even though that Gypsy was ahead of us and we were using it as a benchmarker for our rally, I still had to watch out for the tabs in front. Just like a weapon systems operator in a fighter jet scanning his radar, I was trying to peel hard into the night, through the fog trying to make up the shape an outline of any roadside truck in which we both might crash…. And die. You won’t believe that I did manage to pick out five container trucks parked on the side of the road in which we might have crashed and it was not something which I could say with a definite ease. Whenever I had a hunch that there might be something, I told Tungesh to slow down and we did find a vehicle. 2 were instances where we were driving and at a seconds notice it became all foggy with zero visibility and Mr Schumacher still managed to drive. 

In between all that fog, trucks he managed to keep an eye on our blue beacon vehicle which we thought that we had lost somewhere in the numerous traffic jams and zero visibility. We did manage to regain our vehicle at least six times during the full distance between the two cities. It took us just around 2.5 hours to cover the whole distance between the two cities in such weather. When we had reached Lucknow did it struck us then- we had actually used up six different blue beacon vehicle as a guiding point in reality rather than initial one which we had actually thought of. So when we had lost track of one vehicle and were thinking that we founded some distance away from us, that was not the same vehicle part another different vehicle which we were actually following. 

So in total there were 6 different blue beacon vehicles on that day which we both mistook for one and using that as a benchmark covered more than 80 km in such a short span of time while cutting through jams, nearly crashing into the side of 18 wheeler trucks, following tail lights of other vehicles, peeling the eyes into the white blanket of fog trying to make out what’s in front of us….. Just to survive. 

We both worked as a team to get through but hats off to him who had driven non-stop from Delhi 500+ kilometres away in around 8 hours. He has been nagging me to write about this post for the last 2+ years and this time I fulfilled his wish. 

Following tail lights

Blinded

Max visibility