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.