The small village I am in rural India is about as far away as you can get from New York City.

It’s a 20,000-mile round-trip that begins with two back-to-back 9-hour redeyes, a three-hour layover, another two-hour flight within India, and then 2.5-hour drive up to a remote village called Jais.

After 24 hours of non-stop travel, I was pretty tired for the final two hour drive up a rural highway, but sleep was out of the question. The driver beeped his horn every 3-4 seconds as he attempted to pass every vehicle he could while also trying to avoid hitting donkeys pulling carts, herds of water buffalo, broken down trucks, families of five riding on a single motorized bicycle, camels, monkeys, cows sleeping in the middle of the road and potholes that could swallow a small car.

But it was terrifying because we were always passing trucks and slow cars on a two-lane road which meant we had to pull out into the oncoming traffic lane.

Our driver always drove way too fast and cut it very close when he would swerve back into our lane at the very last minute as we all held our breath and closed our eyes and prayed!

To make matters worse, there always seemed to be cars coming at us that were passing trucks and slow cars just like us and they would be in our lane coming straight at us until they swerved at the last minute! Passing cars on these roads was a terrifying game of Russian roulette. Now I understood why India leads the world in the number of road deaths.

After about an hour of this terrifying travel, I very politely told our driver — who looked about 16 years old – that he was an excellent driver and a very good swerver! But I had a question. What if the drivers who were coming at us would not as good a driver as he was? What if they didn’t swerve in time and they crashed right into us in a fatal head-on collision?

He told me that he understood my concerns but that I needn’t worry because, “In India, all the bad drivers are already dead.”

It was funny – but not that funny.

As I stared out the window, I got the surreal sensation that not only had I traveled a very great distance, but somehow, I had also traveled back in time.