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See this description of the tonga ride from Umballa to Simla (in the CMG 13 July 1886 and reproduced in my Kipling Abroad). Sounds a fun ride Andrew All that he said about the dak gharri and fifty percent more, might with truth be said about the tonga. In addition to the vices of the dak gharri, it has the violent sifting motion of the winnower of a threshing machine. Imagine a sick lady being violently shaken for eight hours with two minute breaks at half hour intervals. This is the treatment she must go through ere reaching Simla. We all know it, and we all put up with it, because we are a slack, limp, go-as-you-please, for-heaven's-sake-don't-make-a-fuss-about-it people; and it is good for us to be told this again and again. The sun shone at Kalka; there was dust at Dagshai; and glare and dust at Solon. According to our notions - we are contented with little - the journey had been a very successful one so far; and the country cousin, in the baby jumper back seat of the tonga, congratulated himself on his luck. The driver was a clever man and a bold, with no hesitation about sending his ponies spinning round corners at a hand gallop, and putting them along the level as fast as they could lay foot to the ground. At the twentieth milestone a curious thing happened. The tonga driver spun merrily round a comer into a thick drizzle which ten minutes after turned to driving rain. Ten minutes later the tonga met a stream coming down the road in a hurry. This stream was broader than the tonga, and in depth halfway to the wheel axle. Said the driver: 'It has been raining much at Simla and Tara Devi. We will make haste.' From that time the rain began to fall in earnest, and the country cousin discovered the well known fact, that the only way in which you can keep yourself moderately dry in a tonga is by half sitting, half kneeling, half crouching on the back seat with your legs tucked under you, and the cape of your waterproof thrown over your right or windward cheek. You cannot open an umbrella to ward the rain off if it blows in behind, because you need both hands to hold on with. Hill rain has a trick of blowing all ways in five minutes, and is very, very chilly. A tonga is constructed to admit as much rain as possible. Again the country cousin imagined himself an invalid and a lady and his imaginings were not pleasant ones. Ladies cannot well sit cross-legged in tongas, and they suffer a good deal from chills nor does rain down the back of the neck improve their health or temper. About the sixteenth milestone the country cousin forgot about playing at imagination; and began to imagine in earnest. The streams down the road side, the little torrents from above that jumped half way out into the road, the chill and damp and discomfort, did not so much matter; the worst of it was that little rocks and handfuls of earth were beginning to trickle gently down from the base of the cliffs. Wherever one looked, a small handful of earth and a few stones were just moving or had just finished rolling. It was disquieting to watch this slither and slide all round - more disquieting in fact than if one big slip had taken place just in front and blocked up the road. At the twelfth milestone, the stones in the road were bigger and harder to get over. A tonga need not turn out of the way for a stone as big as a man's head; but the jolt and jar is not pleasant. There was another tonga just behind the country cousin's, and from time to time - four times in all - the leading driver instructed the country cousin to tell the rear tonga to hurry up, as a piece of cliff was going to fall. There are few things more unpleasant then galloping in blinding rain under an overhanging piece of rock or earth of doubtful reputation. So the ride went on -- the ponies ploughing mud knee-deep through turbid yellow water, now running in-cliff where there was rock and the imperfectly protected road seemed rotten at the edge; now running outcliff where the hill was shaley and great stones had slid into the middle of the road; now pulling up invisible in clouds of steam to be succeeded by other ponies - wet but willing little brutes who did all that lay in their power; and were alternately abused and endeared by the driver. And the tonga jolted and bumped over submerged stones in the water, creaked and strained where there was mud instead of clear washed road or running stream, while the tonga-bar clinked and jingled merrily through it all and the bugle blared huskily and the stones 'skipped like rams'. Presently there was a soft crash - not a hard one - a wild lurch and a string of oaths from the driver. Convinced that the end of all things was at hand, the country cousin prepared to step forth into the ever- lasting hills and die, like a gentleman, of starvation instead of being pitched over-khud like rubbish. But the tonga righted itself, and he was aware that it had, at a particularly sharp and unpleasant turning, run over a dead camel -wet, shiny and puffy in the rain. Luckily only two hind legs lay in the direct route of traffic, or the consequences might have been almost as undignified as the country cousin feared. Then the ponies went on, and the rain fell, and the torrents spouted and once many big stones blocked the road completely, but a kindly hill coolie -who looked like a mountain gnome and made the ponies shy wildly -sprang from nowhere and removed the worst, and the tonga jolted forward and took no harm. Once, too, a string of camels, blundering down in the dusk on the wrong side of the road, gave trouble, and once again the Government Bullock train stopped the way; but the driver, like Thackeray's sailors, 'called upon the prophet and thought but little of it', and the tonga reached the last chowki but one, where a coolie announced that the road was bund. Without any exaggeration, it may be set down that the last six miles of road into Simla are, in the rains, nothing better than a stream bed; and the water channels them from six to eighteen inches deep. It seemed that the coolie's words might be only too true. 'Without doubt,' said the driver however, 'that man is a liar. We will go on and see.' So the tonga went forward, and the country cousin (a little reassured by the nonchalance of the driver) perceived that the real difficulty of the journey began at this point. The roads were diabolical and very steep, and there were many stones and heaps of slided earth. The dusk shut down about this time, and a cart stood across the road while the driver slept inside and was picked out at the end of a deftly applied whiplash. 'The coolie said truth. The road is bund -I do not think -- but we will try.' There lay a strip of stones across the road -- a bank about six foot high on the cliff and three foot high on the Khud side. He put the tonga back a few yards (luckily the ground was comparatively level) and went forward, but the ponies stayed in the middle of the trouble, and the sazk ran forward and smote them under their bellies with a wet rope's end, and they pulled horsefully and the tonga came down on the further side with a soul-shattering bump, and in due course arrived in the thick dark at Simla; everyone except one small dog being drenched to the skin.