Day 47 – Disaster half-way: car crash!

Our nightmare came true: we got in a car crash on day 47, exactly half of our total journey. First off: we’re unhurt. But this is what happened:

I (Rogier) was driving, while Maren was navigating us through beautiful Samarkand looking for fuel, a scarcity in Uzbekistan.

We had to make a left turn at a busy intersection. I waited for the opposite lane to be clear, or so I thought, and made a left turn. A moment later Maren screamed “Rogier!”, I looked to my right and saw an old yellow taxi coming straight at us with squealing tires from the opposite direction. It’s that split second that in retrospect seems to be lasting minutes, but in reality was probably exactly that: a split second.

At the moment of impact our car bumped to the left, hitting another car, a small Daewoo Matiz, that was making a left turn at the same time. With us sandwiched between the two cars, our car was surprisingly little damaged, compared to the taxi that was standing total loss in the middle of the intersection.

It’s that split second that in retrospect seems to be lasting minutes, but in reality was probably exactly that: a split second.

A crowd gathered around the scene within minutes. The drivers of both cars demanded money from us. And although I indeed did not see the taxi coming, I suspected he was speeding, which was later confirmed by the police. If he had not been speeding, he wouldn’t have crashed into us, and the Matiz. But trying to explain that to a group of not-happy Uzbeks was not easy. Luckily a friendly local called Zafar decided to help us out. He had studied in London, and was happy to spend the rest of the day translating for us.

The police arrived and made clear they would decide whose fault it was. A professional drawing was made of the whole situation and the speed of the taxi driver was calculated. He drove into the side of our car with 55k km/h, making us realise how lucky we’ve been that we’re completely unhurt.

We spend the rest of the day at the police station. Considering we’re in a country seen as a police state, we where surprised about the hospitality and friendliness of the police, Zafar and everybody else we dealt with on that day. The police made a police report with which we had to go to court. However, going to court would take up to 2 weeks, while we only had a couple days left on our visa.

Our lack of time to go to court, the speeding of the taxi driver, and the fact that our car was only damaged on the back door, suggesting we almost crossed the road already before he hit us, made the police decide it was better that we would skip court and nobody paid anybody anything and everybody would take care of his own repairs. With time being our priority (we can’t arrive late in Turkmenistan) we couldn’t agree more.

We’ll visit a BYD showroom in Tehran next week for a full check-up.

At the end of the day when we had finished all the paper work, as well as a hospital visit to confirm I wasn’t drunk (checked by blowing in the face of a doctor, four hours after the accident occurred), our new friend Zafar brought us to a car repair. A group of friendly guys worked for an hour to remove the dents of our car, which looked like new again. Well, not really. But if we drive fast enough and only photograph from the right angle, nobody will notice. We’ll visit a BYD showroom in Tehran next week for a full check-up.

12 hours after the accident we got back to the hotel where we left that morning, just a 10-minute drive from the scene, only to depart on the same road again the next day. At these moments we realise that no matter how disastrous a situation can appear, things can always be worse. We’re unhurt. We keep going.