The recent trip to Hyderabad was rather exciting! Well it should have been a straight route, And the home work was pretty much done before leaving our place, The route selected was via NH9.
Mumbai Via Pune to Solapur Road condition : 9/10.
It was a lovely drive all the way to solapur which turned into a nightmare lateron.
We had opted to take the Humnabad - Zaheerabad route to reach Hyderabad and to our horror the road was majorly under construction, I saw a small board saying, Date of Completion : 29-12-2017, Trust me the work won't be done before that, I expect the route to be completed only after a good 3-4 years!!
The total of those 300 Kms from solapur to Hyderabad took us roughly 6 hours, The route has several diversions, The road is in pathetic condition to say the least, And travelling during the night on this route is asking for trouble.
Would rate the route 4/10 in its current state.
Lot of rough patches, Un even speed breakers, huge potholes, Etc, And it was just not possible to slow the car for all of them everytime, So i had to go through them in good speed! Have to say XUV took it all really well.
While returning back we decided to take an alternate route till solapur and we were majorly relying on google maps + Xuv's navigation for the directions (First mistake)
We decided to take the, Kalaburagi - Akkalkot route, But to our horror both the Navigation system took the most narrowest and shortest route possible ( I totally forgot it was obvious the google maps to select the shortest route till the destination) Second mistake.
Which landed us in almost a jungle! Well the route was as seen below,
Just a single road, No traffic, No Network, No humans seen anywere around!
The road was almost 30 kms long which was very scenic no doubt, But if a breakdown, There was no help to be seen anywhere! No network as well! So yeah it was scary, It was too late to turn back around and we had only one option to keep going ahead, We went pass a few very small villages and asking the locals about the route they confirmed we are going in the right direction but we took a wrong turn some were which landed us in the wrong route all together and we missed the highway! We also saw a bunch of peacocks flying just near our car, A couple of snakes and some really beautiful birds as well.
The road lateron disappeared! Only rocks to drive on which included huge holes which continued for about 10kms! The xuv had some real tough time! When i say no roads, I literally mean it, I could not click a snap of the road since i was driving and my dad was literally holding on really tight to be in his seat
I really thought the car would develop some suspension noises or least the alignment would go off, XUV took a lot of abuse! Trust me.
But to my surprise as soon as there was smooth tarmac, The car was driving as if nothing happened, Left the steering and the car would still go straight, No kind of noises nothing!
