A shopping list to cross the subcontinent with: Imodium, one tape of annoying sitar music, boil-in-the-bag chicken vindaloo, and the complete works of Patrick Jake O’Rourke, the American journalist, travel writer and political satirist.

Except on this occasion I won’t be needing the books because as we set off on our epic journey from Islamabad in Pakistan to Calcutta, India, PJ O’Rourke is sitting right next to me.

For the next 2,000 miles we will be performing a kind of giant slalom around rusting Tata trucks, sacred cows and meandering buffalo. Not only that, but to complete the trip in our allotted five days we will need to average 30mph — three times the average speed of Indian traffic — on some of the most dangerous roads in the world. The only upside is that we will witness some of the most spectacular scenery and landmarks on the planet — as well as PJ’s iconoclastic wit.

If south Asia is a political tinderbox, my main concern is that my travelling companion will turn out to be a flamethrower. Back in the US he isn’t known for his diplomacy: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” he once said, while his books, such as Republican Party Reptile and Parliament of Whores, provoke mirth and controversy in equal measure.

Neither is he unknown further afield; just the week before we met he had been refused a visa to Iran. “I once did a piece with a Hezbollah leader in Lebanon who is big mates with the Iranians,” explains PJ in the back of the Discovery. “Maybe that annoyed them. Or the fact I blatantly harangued the Iranian administration in public.”

Fortunately, for this trip politics will be the last thing on his mind. “I have the least driving skills and the smallest bladder of anyone,” he boasts as team leader Iain Chapman warns us of 16-hour days behind the wheel.

We speed out of Islamabad on the M2 and PJ is busy talking about going without booze in Saudi during the first Gulf war. “I was so long without alcohol I started to think clearly,” he says. The talk turns to Northern Ireland where Chapman was a sapper in the British Army and O’Rourke had recently spent some time. “I am the only Irish American to have gone to Northern Ireland and found the only people I like there were the British Army. The name helped me get around, though,” he recalls. The pair swap bomb stories and laugh in easy camaraderie. I keep an eye out for buffalo.

We’ve passed six traffic cops at 20mph over the 60 limit but it is 47C outside and they can’t be bothered to chase us. In our air-conditioned Land Rover we waft along cooled to 16C.

The motorway whisks us smoothly to Lahore, Pakistan’s second city. There the relative serenity of the motorway is suddenly replaced by chaos: traffic jams and the sound of car horns cloud the cabin as we try to navigate but there are no signposts. Suddenly PJ points out of the window: “I swear that’s the same kid that picked my pocket in Albania.”

Lahore is just 10 miles from the disputed border with India. Crossing it was always going to be a nightmare. Chapman punches the tape player’s “on” button and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards break into Amazing Grace. He seems to think it will ease diplomacy. Instead, it costs us $100 in bribes to cross the frontier.

Fifteen hours after leaving Islamabad we reach the Budgerigar hotel, near Chandigarh. Like the British Raj, we have escaped the heat of the Indian summer and fled to the foothills of the Himalayas. It will mean a slower drive across the top of the world’s biggest democracy, but for the sake of 15 degrees it is worth it.

Mid-morning and monkeys line the snaking mountain road up to Simla, Delhi’s hill station during British rule. Victorian architecture and the primates are the only legacies of the Raj.

“That monkey’s got Prince Charles’s ears,” screams O’Rourke.

In Pakistan, bandits have been known to kidnap foreigners. In India it’s the roads themselves that are the country’s murderers: 164 people die on them each day and a quarter of the world’s bus crashes occur here. ()

We head down out of the hills for the heat of the plain. The monsoon is just over the horizon and the humidity is gagging. Next on the route is Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. A tourist cliché, perhaps, but then PJ does admit to searching out McDonald’s wherever he travels.

No one is disappointed. The majesty of a place that took 20,000 men 23 years to hand-craft is wasted in words. How do you describe a mosaic of 2m flowers each of 64 separately inlaid pieces? I sit on the marble bench on which Diana showed the world she was alone. I am not. Two obese and sweaty Germans in white socks and Birkenstocks sit down next to me, but even that can’t spoil the moment. O’Rourke, for once, is gobsmacked.

There are some basic rules for driving in the subcontinent. For a start, there is a pecking order on the road. First and foremost there’s the cow. A sacred animal for Hindus that has right of way on the roads. Then there’s the Tata truck, a garden shed on wheels. Drivers come from the Ralf Schumacher school of spatial awareness. That is to say they have none.

Next comes the water buffalo. Unlike Tatas they at least have a safety feature — their smell. Trouble is, air-conditioning makes the buffalo early warning system redundant.

Bottom of the rung comes the auto-rickshaw. A kind of Reliant Robin on steroids, they scoot about the streets crammed so full of everything, including people, that sardines would feel claustrophobic. It is also a little known fact that the average Indian motorist uses his horn 10 times a mile.

“F****** Tatas. It’s not how I want to die,” curses PJ as we avoid yet another lumbering truck. “I’m going to have to rewrite my chapter on Third World driving hints and tips in Holidays in Hell. I had no idea that Tatas existed.”

I dig in my bag for the book: “Road hazards: what would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road,” he writes. “Learning to drive like a native: in the Third World most driving is done with the horn, or ‘Egyptian brake pedal’.

“Dangerous curves: these are marked by white wooden crosses — memorials to people who’ve died in traffic accidents — and give a rough statistical indication of how much trouble you’re likely to have at that spot. Thus when you come through a curve in a full power slide and are suddenly confronted with a veritable forest of crucifixes, you know you’re dead.” I drift into an uneasy sleep.

The smell of rotting flesh wakes me up. This is the Ganges where it scythes through Varanasi, “the city of learning and burning”, a centre of academia and crematoriums. Funeral pyres line the banks of the holy river where the faithful are washing their souls inside and out.

PJ is back at the hotel in bed. “I’m not getting up early to go photograph dead people,” he mutters. “I’ve seen enough dead people to last me a lifetime. And if the Tatas have anything to do with it, this lifetime might not last much longer.”

We pull into the one-horse town of Asansol. The dusty, rutted trunk road is littered with tumbledown stalls selling bloodstained broken bits of Tatas. There are vultures waiting for even the mechanical things that die in India.

Calcutta is now within spitting distance. I catch myself behind the wheel recounting statistics — like half of all accidents happen within a mile of home. “I’ve been counting and there’s been an average of one crash every 10½ miles,” announces PJ helpfully.

The speedo is nudging 60mph. We are on a rare piece of clear road, except for one lumbering Tata going our way up ahead. I pull out to pass. Almost side-by-side, the driver in the Tata yanks his wheel hard right. I have nowhere to go. All I can do is stand on the middle pedal and swing the wheel to the left.

Maybe God or even Vishnu was looking over us, because we miss the back of the truck by the length of PJ’s cigarette. He takes a series of quickfire drags followed by one that fills his lungs to bursting. Then he coughs. “The only trip I am going to make after this is to the shopping mall,” he says. ()

DELHI LAUNCHES CATTLE CRACKDOWN

There are an estimated 40,000 cows wandering the streets of Delhi. Some are wild but many are simply allowed to roam free so that their owners do not have to pay for feed.

Because Hindus consider the cow to be a sacred animal — an individual can be jailed for injuring or killing one — the roving bovines have traditionally gone unchallenged.

However, that view is slowly changing. Recent opposition from Delhi’s 13m inhabitants, keen to promote the city as a modern metropolis, has prompted a crackdown on cows by the city’s officials. They have ruled that the animals are a menace to public order and health and are responsible for clogging up the city’s roads. “Cows are a serious problem. They wander all over the roads, causing traffic jams, and are responsible for some serious accidents,” says Dr SK Yadav, a vet with the city council.

The city has now been divided into 12 zones, each one patrolled by teams with trucks, ropes and cattle prods. The cows are captured and taken to sanctuaries outside the city. However, the problem of what to do with them remains. They cannot be put down and no state in India wants to take the captured animals off Delhi’s hands. For now, the cows are being held in detention while their future is determined.

MIRROR, SIGNAL, PRAY

Maxwell Pereira, the police chief who oversees the chaotic flow of 15m vehicles on the roads of India’s capital city, has one of the toughest jobs in motoring, writes James Luckhurst.

“We deal with everything from camels, elephants, bullock carts and buffalo buggies to horse-driven carriages and all kinds of mechanised transport,” he says. “It can be a nightmare. So many drivers display an utter lack of knowledge where right of way is concerned. This leads to wrong overtaking, a wanton disregard of traffic signals and indiscriminate hooting.

“We must also deal with car drivers performing rash acts of zigzagging and lane-changing. But the Indian driver prides himself on his keen reflexes to see him clear of all potential trouble. Even so, between 12,000 and 15,000 traffic prosecutions are launched every day.”







A longer version of this article appears on the relaunched Channel 4 motoring website www.channel4.com/4car