Kerala calls itself “God’s Own Country,” which is either supreme confidence or extreme irony depending on whether you’re looking at the landscape or the traffic. The state’s tourism board has successfully marketed this slogan to international travelers who arrive expecting divine intervention and instead discover they’ll need it just to cross the street.

The landscape genuinely is beautiful – backwaters with houseboats, beaches with actual sand, hill stations with tea plantations, tropical forests with wildlife. It’s lush, green, humid, and photogenic. National Geographic has published approximately 47,000 photos of Kerala proving this point.

Then you try to ride a motorcycle through it.

Kerala’s roads exist in a state of permanent contradiction. They’re paved, mostly. They’re marked with lane lines that everyone ignores. They have traffic rules that are technically law but practically suggestions. And they’re shared by motorcycles, cars, buses, trucks, auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, cows, and occasionally elephants, all operating on different assumptions about right-of-way.

The buses deserve special mention. Kerala’s state transport buses are driven by men who’ve apparently made peace with mortality – their own and everyone else’s. They pilot vehicles that weigh several tons through traffic gaps that look insufficient for a bicycle. They take curves at speeds that seem inconsistent with both physics and survival. They stop abruptly for passengers who emerge from the jungle like they’ve been waiting there for days.

Riding a motorcycle behind a Kerala bus is a theological experience. You find yourself praying to deities you don’t believe in, making bargains with the universe, and reconsidering your position on determinism vs. free will.

The backroads – the routes that take you away from highways and through villages – are where Kerala’s traffic reaches its philosophical peak. These are narrow roads, barely two lanes, often less. They wind through coconut plantations and rice paddies, past houses built right up to the road edge, through villages where “Main Street” is just the road you’re already on.

Traffic in these villages operates on what can only be described as community-scale game theory. Everyone knows everyone else. The bus driver knows which grandmother will cross the street without looking. The auto-rickshaw driver knows which dog always chases vehicles. The motorcyclists know which curve has gravel and which has a pothole that could swallow a wheel.

Outsiders – tourists like me on rented motorcycles – don’t have this contextual knowledge. We’re playing a game where everyone else knows the rules and we’re guessing. The result is a continuous state of near-miss, where collisions are avoided not through our skill but through everyone else compensating for our incompetence.

This is where the theology becomes relevant. After your fifth near-miss of the day, you start wondering if something is protecting you. Not skill – you’re not that good. Not luck – luck doesn’t work with this consistency. Maybe God’s Own Country comes with divine traffic management? Maybe there’s some cosmic force ensuring that tourists don’t die on Kerala’s backroads because that would be bad for tourism?

Or maybe the local drivers are just exceptionally skilled at avoiding collisions with idiots, and you’re the latest in a long line of idiots they’ve successfully not killed.

I rode from Kochi to Munnar, a route that climbs from sea level to hill stations through increasingly dramatic scenery. The road narrows as you climb. The curves get tighter. The drop-offs get more concerning. And the traffic doesn’t decrease; it just becomes more varied. You’re passing trucks loaded with tea leaves, tourist buses full of people seeking God’s Own Country, and local motorcycles carrying entire families – dad driving, mom on the back, two kids sandwiched in the middle, nobody wearing helmets.

The family motorcycle configuration is its own theological statement. It suggests either supreme faith in divine protection or supreme disregard for statistical probability. Probably both. When you’re carrying your entire family on a motorcycle with no safety equipment through mountain traffic, you’ve moved beyond risk assessment into whatever comes after it. Faith? Fatalism? A cultural understanding of risk that’s fundamentally different from Western paranoia?

The near-misses accumulate. A bus passes you on a blind curve. An auto-rickshaw emerges from a side road without slowing. A cow decides the middle of the road is where it wants to be, and traffic routes around it like water around a stone. A truck coming downhill has clearly lost its brakes and is using the engine, the gears, and prayer to control speed.

Each incident should be terrifying. Cumulatively they should be traumatizing. Instead, they become routine. By day three, you’re riding through chaos with the same emotional affect you’d bring to commuting. This is fine. Everything is fine. The bus will probably not hit you. The cow will probably move. God’s own traffic will probably not kill God’s own tourists.

The theology here isn’t about God intervening to prevent accidents. It’s about accepting that risk is constant, control is illusion, and the gap between disaster and safety is maintained by collective attention rather than individual skill. You’re trusting strangers to not kill you. They’re trusting you to not kill them. Everyone’s survival depends on everyone else’s moment-to-moment decisions.

This is either the most beautiful expression of collective humanity or a terrifying indictment of traffic safety infrastructure. Probably both.

Kerala’s backroads teach you that you can’t control the chaos. You can only participate in it with attention and hope. The bus drivers aren’t going to slow down for you. The pedestrians aren’t going to stop appearing suddenly. The road isn’t going to get wider or less potholed. These are constants. Your variables are speed, awareness, and whether you can maintain calm while processing terror.

The spiritual tourism industry in Kerala is huge. People come for yoga retreats, Ayurvedic treatments, meditation centers. They’re seeking peace, enlightenment, escape from the stress of modern life. Then they get in an auto-rickshaw to go from the airport to their retreat center and experience more adrenaline in twenty minutes than a year of corporate meetings could generate.

Maybe this is the real spiritual practice. Not the yoga, not the meditation, but the daily confrontation with mortality on Kerala’s roads. Every trip is an exercise in letting go – letting go of control, of certainty, of the illusion that you determine your fate. The road determines your fate. The other drivers determine your fate. The cow in the middle of the highway determines your fate.

All you can do is ride carefully and hope that God’s Own Country is still taking suggestions from tourists who would prefer not to die today.

By the time I left Kerala, I’d had approximately forty near-death experiences and zero actual accidents. The theology of near-misses is apparently robust. God’s Own Traffic may be chaos, but it’s chaos that works.

Most of the time. Usually. Hopefully. If God’s paying attention.

Which, given the name, you’d think God would be.