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Old 19th October 2009, 12:53   #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteKnight View Post
Indeed a trip of a lifetime. I really like your narration, especially the launch. Waiting for the rest
Thanx. Diwali has slowed things down a little. Will try and post the next couple of days' account by the end of day today.
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Old 19th October 2009, 15:25   #17
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Kanishk i said this before on PUG, its just incredible. The travelogue with pictures on T-BHP, just takes the cake. Take another couple of days off work and finish writing the story....very eager to read more.
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Old 19th October 2009, 17:19   #18
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Hi Kanishk,

What a launch of a travelogue! I have just glued to it. I hope completing reading your complete travelogue will make me commit one thing to myself ! surely! Gonna fro a trip to Leh ! No matter when it happens in life.

Just enjoying your travelogue. Wonderful trip mate.

cheers
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Old 19th October 2009, 19:23   #19
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Originally Posted by sharanramesh View Post
Kanishk i said this before on PUG, its just incredible. The travelogue with pictures on T-BHP, just takes the cake. Take another couple of days off work and finish writing the story....very eager to read more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LongDrive lover View Post
Hi Kanishk,

What a launch of a travelogue! I have just glued to it. I hope completing reading your complete travelogue will make me commit one thing to myself ! surely! Gonna fro a trip to Leh ! No matter when it happens in life.

Just enjoying your travelogue. Wonderful trip mate.

cheers
Thanx guys.
- Kanishk
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Old 19th October 2009, 20:43   #20
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Day 3

Day 3 - September 13th 2009

Typed on Sep-13-2009, 21:37

Yet another day has gone by while we speed (petrol and otherwise) towards Leh. Today was a day with a lazy start. I don't know if I heard the chime yesterday or not. So, I guess I must have slept pretty decently. I did get disturbed in the night as mom had woken up to switch off the ac but not too much. Woke up around 6:30 or so ( a little sleepy as usual!). And then got ready to go. The hotel had a complimentary breakfast so we decided to wait for that before leaving. Stopping at another location for some grub didn't make any sense at all. The breakfast is supposed to be ready by 7:30. When I called around 7:28, I was told that it would be ready only by 7:30. On reminding the person of the time, I was told that it would be ready in another 10-15 minutes. Talk about Indian Stretchable Time on a Sunday morning when we were already getting delayed! Anyways, 15 minutes later, we decided to walk down to the conference room and have whatever was available and then vamoose. They were serving some idlis, some uttapam, bread (but no omelettes), upma, kesari bhat and samosas (which arrived a little later). We decided to stick to just the idlis, uttapam, upma and kesari bhat. Did I say 'just'? Coffee and tea were a little late in arriving but arrive they did just before we finished the grub. The coffee was decent (like most of the other items in breakfast). Nothing that would make me wanna go there again but then nothing that would wanna make me go elsewhere if I was there. Overall, edible, digestible and mildly tasty.

Packed our stuff into the car (which was pretty dirty due to all the rain yesterday) and then off we went all over again at 8:28 am. Thane was seen off and then so was Ghorbunder road (or however that is spelt!). Somewhere along the way we saw our first glimpse of the sea. Once we were out of the city area, I stopped at a BP petrol pump to top up. And wonder of wonders, they had petrol! Can you imagine that? Petrol at a petrol station is hard to come by these days. Tanked up the car and was more than happy to realize that the average I got was 14+. That’s pretty good considering the fact that I was cruising along at a mildly fast 120 most of the time in this journey. And all the while we had the ac on. So overall, a good show by the car.

The ghat section after Bombay is pretty nice. Fresh and green and beautiful like the other ghat sections we crossed before. There were a ton of kids on some sort of cycle yatra that we crossed today. Dressed in Orange, they were strung across the highway like bunches of beads on a broken necklace all the way from Bombay to somewhere deep into Gujarat!

Today, for the first time in the journey I got frustrated with the traffic. The road is a regular four laner but there were so many trucks that I thought there was a queue all the way from Mumbai to enter the Delhi gates!! Consider this: you are about to overtake when a trailer loaded with 2 containers swings out in front of you. And now that he has swung out, he will no way swing back - way too much inertia, momentum or pure thick headedness I guess! And then at a blazingly fast 33.28 kmph, he will attempt to overtake another trailer loaded with iron rods running along at an intergalactic speed of 33.275 kmph. Now, they go neck to neck for a while before the rod guy gets one up his backside and decides to floor the accelerator. With this, his speed increases to the warp speed of 33.278 kmph. Just about enough for the guys in the two trucks to share lunch before they begin to loose contact. Arm length contact that is!! But the good thing is that once the guys have had the lunch, the container trailer swings back into the left lane allowing you to overtake him. A lesson I learnt was that when you see the container guy preparing lunch, blow the horn like crazy and he will delay the lunch meeting by just about enough to let you pass by. Which takes me to another part of the day. Today was a 'horny' day! I blew the horn 86.8% of the time I was driving. It did help me get to the head of the queue of Delhi trucks. I guess no trucker wants to mess with a horny guy :-D.

We crossed into Gujarat around 11:07 today. The four lane road finally ended somewhere about 50 odd km before Surat. That’s when the six lane one started. And that’s when I could sustain cruising speeds of above 100. I did meet a few morons but then they were par for the course. We had lunch at hotel Ekta somewhere along the way. This place looked like a regular trucker dhaba! And it was one too. The food was yum. We had dal fry, tandoori rotis, mixed vegetable, curd and between the two of us three glasses of chaach. Now, that chaach was one cool thing! Literally as well as otherwise. One glug and you could feel the coolness sweep down your throat. A must have in this land of the blazing sun! On a side note, we didn't feel very hot inside the car. The ac seems to be keeping up. Not bad. Lunch done, we decided to speed on towards Himmatnagar on the Gujarat Rajasthan border. But then somehow that seemed to be way too far away. And then that would mean that tomorrow, I drive like crazy till I reach Gurgaon. So decided to stopover at Rashi's place in Baroda instead. And what a welcome decision it was! I slowed down from my regular 120 to a crawling 100. Mom mentioned that I seemed to be going pretty slow!! I now know where all that speed in my blood comes from! (Side note to myself: speed in my blood, speed in my car, speedy journey - is this blog about travel or about speed? End note.) Well, it was a slow down cause I didn't want to stress myself too much. And it was a lot of fun too. I did a few zig zags on the now somewhat empty road too excited with the idea of landing up at home and getting some much deserved (at least according to me!) rest. We stopped somewhere on the way for a pitstop. Had some lassis. Mom had the regular lassi while I ventured (despite my earlier notes to myself) into the special lassi land. The special lassi comes with blood red colouring floating on the top along with some coconut powder and chunks of cashews! And it’s a tad bit less sweeter than the regular one! At least it had that redeeming quality since mom found hers to be extremely sweet. A little lassi wiser, off we went towards Vadodara. Got stuck in a long queue of trucks at a stretch where the road had become two laned (due to a bridge) with trucks coming down the other lane. Time to exercise my leapfrogging skills. And so we would trundle along behind a trailer or truck or some other overloaded relative of the above till we got a chance. And then metal the pedal and flash the lights and zip to the next empty spot tucked behind yet another oversized crawling giant beast! Was kinda fun. Especially since it didn't last too long - just for 10 odd minutes. I got my thrills without getting frustrated.

Found the turning to Baroda that dad had told me about and took it. Got a call from Rashi telling us that it would take at least an hour from there since we had to go through the busy Makkarpura stretch. We reached Kala Ghoda chowk in about 20 odd minutes which included a short fuel stop at a shell pump. I asked the attendant to tank up and then casually enquired about the price difference with the other stations. When I realized that it was a massive 2 bucks and that I had another 30 odd litres to fill, I decided to stop the metre at a thousand bucks. I will at any rate have to use the petrocard. Might as well speed up the usage [all puns intended]. Met dad near Kala Ghoda and followed him home. End of journey at 16:03 hours.

Didn't do much today after that except laze around at home chatting with mom n dad. BTW, this place is really hot. You sweat the moment you stop taking a shower. And you sweat under a fan. And you sweat if you walk out. And you sweat if you think and you sweat if you don’t...

And now the days memories typed, its time to wander off into the clouds. And maybe miss the midnight chime :-).

G'nite for the day.

PS: I opened my pack of chikkis today. Chikkis are good to have when on the road.


Car Statistics:
Distance covered: 440
Time: 7:35 hours.GPS stats:
Trip odometer: 425km
Moving time: 06:10 hours
Stopped: 37:42 minutes.
Max speed: 128kmph
Moving avg: 68.9kmph
Overall avg: 62.6kmph
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Old 19th October 2009, 23:57   #21
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Day 4

Day 4 - September 14th 2009


Sep-15-2009, 21:27
Yesterday. The day I crossed into the 4 figure mark while driving. What a day. A day that crept into my bones before it was over. I was creaking and aching by the time I was done with the day. So much so that all I did in terms of this travelogue was take down some bullet points so that I could remember the day when I sat down to write about it. And that time has come now.

The previous day ended when I finished typing in my memories and crept into bed by 11:15. Yeah, I know I went to sleep early. Must be the tiredness of the previous few days. Otherwise as those who know me, know that although I love my beauty sleep, I won't go to it. Nopes, I just wont' sleep till I am forced to. I digress. I slept early.

Oct-16-2009, 01:01
After several weeks, its back to travelogue writing. All I did between the last entry and the end of the trip in terms of this travelogue was to take down bullet points about what I would write later. And that later has finally arrived! I hope I haven't missed any major events or happenings or wisecracks but then what I've forgotten is forgotten and nobody is any wiser.

To continue from the (several weeks long!) last digression, I slept early. And slept terribly because of the heat! We didn't switch on the ac for some arbit reason (I normally catch a sniffle if I sleep in an ac room if the weather outside is hot during the transition from ac to outside). And we forgot to switch on the cooler in the other room as well. Happy life!! Slept through the whole night floating in the dead sea!! Got up from the swimming lesson around 6 and then got ready to go.

We left home around 7:15 headed for Rajasthan for the day. A good breakfast and delicious cold coffee in my stomach meant that I could drive for a longer distance without breaks. The plan was to drive till Jaipur and then sleep over there before heading out to Meerut the next day. After dad dropped us near the highway, we headed towards the Vadodara-Ahmedabad expressway. A couple of kms later, we reached the toll gate of the expressway. Toll paid, I sped on towards Ahmedabad on one of the best roads of the drive. Superb, straight and speedy! The curves are long and sweeping allowing one to cruise along without slowing down or dropping gears. I hit the now common 120 and kept Shararat pointed towards Ahmedabad crossing almost all and sundry on the way. Although I argue with almost all small cars and win the argument, today, I just kept the car in cruise mode letting the folks who were speeding like maniacs (hey, anybody driving faster than me is considered to be speeding like a maniac !!). The only thing I didn't even want to begin an argument with was an E280 that came wafting along. Most other cars, I would have given a run for their money. But somehow, the E seemed too stately and living in its own dream world to disturb. Guess, that’s the calming effect of the expressway on mere mortals like me. So, there we were speeding along on the expressway with the average moving speed steadily drifting upwards. Towards the very end of the drive on the expressway, I had hit an average moving speed of 99.1 kms on the gps. This included the trip within Baroda and hence the slightly lower number than what I would have liked. A triple digit average speed would have been welcome.

The expressway soon came to an end. Towards the end there is a ramp on the left side that one needs to get on to if one wants to go towards the capital. We didn't know this. The expressway guys didn't know that we didn't know. So, they didn't put up any markings. And since we didn't know, we missed it. I crossed the ramp and casually looked towards it. And saw the signboard for New Delhi flashing by somewhere far up on the ramp!! I couldn't even smash the brakes cause I was on an expressway! And I couldn't really stop and reverse the car either. Left with no options, I headed towards the toll booth a couple of kms away in the hope that I would be able to get back through some city road to the GQ. On enquiring with the guy at the toll booth, I was told that I should continue in the same direction and then later on take a right towards the ring road. That kinda sounded okay and so I headed straight. Straight into the mess that is the city roads of Ahmedabad. Monday morning blues had hit the city and everybody just wanted everybody else to get out of their way. And ended up blocking everybody else. After the expressway, this felt like leaving heaven and landing up in hell!! Muttering and cursing, I crawled along the craters and potholes and mud tracks that people in Ahmedabad are forced to call roads. There seemed to be some road construction activity happening in the city though.

Somehow, we managed to get out of the city and headed towards the highway. After leaving the city, we got into yet another potholed highway towards Gandhinagar / Himatnagar. We stopped at a smallish place next to a petrol pump for a bio break and some chaach. The chaach was not so nice. Avoidable place I would say. There was a barren tree behind the petrol pump that had quite a few crows on it. Although I wanted to take some snaps, I just didn't feel like taking out the camera after the hell ride. And, somehow the tree didn't seem all that photo worthy at that point in time. Anyways, we got back into the car and headed towards New Delhi. A little beyond this stop, the road became better (although still just double laned). Soon we hit the spot where the bypass joined this part of the highway and we were back on the GQ. Yipee!! The GQ in these parts is pretty beautiful. On the highway stretches, it has flowers planted in the centre. Once you get into a town or city, the highway is bound on both sides by fences. The flowers migrate to these fences. It feels like speeding through some sort of a walled garden in these areas. A quirk of the highway on these parts (and a pretty dangerous one at that!) is that the median has openings along the apex of a curve. I almost ran into a guy crossing the road while I was negotiating the curve. Will somebody tell the nincompoop who designed this that gaps in the median should be pretty much visible when one is on the highway?

The previous night, mom decided to wash all our bottles and fill them with water from home. That way, we wouldn't have to bother about running out of water and stopping to purchasing any bottles on the way. Unfortunately for me, my bottle had a little leftover smell and taste from the washing liquid. Yuck! I had to throw away the water and wash the bottle a little bit. Even that didn't get rid of the taste. Ugh.

Somewhere around 9 - 9:15, I realized that I was getting a little low on fuel. Started looking around for my favourite brand of fuel. Surprisingly, no outlets of BP were around in that area. Finally, I turned up at an IOC outlet and put in some fuel. I found out that the fuel across the border was cheaper so put in only 500 odd bucks worth of it. I asked for a bill and got one for some 450 odd rupees. I asked them to give me a bill for 500 bucks and he mentioned that that’s exactly what he'd given. That’s when I realized that the bill was in Gujarati. Got it exchanged for one in English, got back into the car and sped onwards. A half an hour later, we crossed into 'Veer Bhumi Rajasthan'. Somewhere along the way, we had methi paranthas that mom had packed in Baroda. The paranthas were super soft and we were wondering about what had gone into them. Spoke to Rashi and she asked her mom about it. We later realized that the paranthas had a nice layer of olive oil in them to make them super soft.

Somewhere around 11, mom ran out of change and so we decided to get a 500 Gandhi exchanged for some smaller denomination notes. And so at the next toll booth, that’s what mom presented. One of the senior folks who was around strolled to us (it seemed to be a slack day with not too much traffic at the toll plaza). He told us that they were low on change themselves. When we told him that we had absolutely no change, he said, "Madam ke purse mein to zaroor change ka khajana hoga. Sab madam ke paas yeh khajana hota hai". Well, this madam didn't have the khajana so he had to relent and hand us the change. We promised him that we would utilize it at the next plaza!

A little after we had entered Rajasthan, we hit some of the loveliest ghats that I'd seen. Snaky mountain roads, green hillsides, and the verdant countryside were a complete antithesis of what I'd imagined Rajasthan to be! There were places where the hills were divided into portions using some sort of a shrub (I don't think it was cactus). The apportioned areas looked pretty neat while we whizzed along. The twisty roads seemed to be a nice place to challenge myself and Shararat. Blip the throttle, drop a cog, thunder through the corners as if on rails. Taking a racing line and clipping apexes seemed to have become the order of the day!

The F1 driver in me a little satiated, we turned our thoughts to pet puja. We saw a place with a palio parked outside and decided to stop there on a whim because it was there. The place was 'Dreamview resort'. Set amidst a turn in the road, the place looked promising. The restaurant in the place had very high roofs and reminded me of royalty somehow. We ordered a lemon soda for me and some tea for mom. And then waited. And waited some more. And waited a little more for the simple lemon soda and tea to arrive. I went and enquired at the kitchen if they had forgotten about us. Just the two of us, in a high roofed place that had nothing else except sparrows. Quite a few of those. I took some snaps of them to pass the time. Finally, when we were on the verge of getting up and leaving, the drinks arrived. We gulped them down and while mom made the payments, I walked out to take some more snaps. The resort was located in a beautiful part of the hills surrounded by greenery. I tried my hand at some snaps with focus on the far hills with a touch of the flowers in the compound. They haven't come out too well but will post them anyways.



View From Dream View Resort



Another View From Dream View Resort



Yet Another View From Dream View Resort



My Experiments With Near And Far Photography



Another Experiment



A flower shot



Our thirst and bio break taken care of, off we went again on the road for another half an hour before hitting a petrol pump. I tanked up on the cheaper petrol. This was the first full tank since we left Mumbai. Got a mileage of 12.93 since we left Mumbai. This included all the diversions into the cities as well as the slower sections of the highway. Overall, not bad I think considering the large heart of the car.

Somewhere along the bypass of Udaipur, the GQ diverges from NH8. It goes towards Chittorgarh and then onto Ajmer. We took the diversion and then Rashi called to ask us where we were. When we told her that we were on NH 76, she panicked a little as we were supposed to be on NH8 which is the old Bombay-Delhi road. After a little search on the web, we got a call telling us that we were on the correct stretch. Happy to know that, we went onwards towards Delhi. A little before Chittorgarh, the GQ bypasses the city. At this point, there weren't any directions and there were three different roads forking out. First, we took the leftmost one but somehow that didn't seem right. It was a little too narrow and single laned. The centre one seemed to be good but it looked like it was a flyover under construction. So we reversed and took the rightmost one. And a little later turned around because that didn't seem right either. Came back to a petrol pump at the intersection. He told us to take the left road. Which is what we did again. And to our chagrin, it seemed to go into a village. We saw some guys playing cards (in the middle of the day!) the directions and were told that the actual one was the centre one. I guess the petrol pump guy would have thought that the left one was the obvious one since the leftmost one was a village road! Anyways, after backtracking a km or so, we finally got on to the right track. It looked right too - huge and well made and bound on both sides. Surprisingly, this whole stretch between Udaipur to here (and even further) was pretty much devoid of traffic. We hardly saw anybody on the way. All we saw were little hamlets selling some nice colourful streamers for trucks along with some swords and shields and spears. I told mom that we should probably buy one of those colourful things for Shararat and decorate her up a bit.

We sped through those parts and soon got thirsty. Wanted to stop for a pepsi somewhere but the only shops that came up sold oil for trucks! Dang! After some driving, we came across a Ghar outlet of BP. We stopped for a diet pepsi for me and some fresh lemon soda for mom. Bio break taken care of and our tanks filled with liquid, we took a couple of snaps before heading off again. Somewhere around this time, I brought up the idea of going all the way to Gurgaon again. Mom said that that would be something we should think about a little closer to evening when we would have a better idea of the remaining distance. This was sometime around 3 in the afternoon.




Bharat Petroleum Ghar Dhaba Outlet



A View From BP Ghar



Kanishk n Shararat @ BP Ghar



A Tired Yet Ready To Leave Mom @ BP Ghar




We didn't stop for lunch that day as mom (MIL) had given us some more paranthas for the way. Mom would just roll them up and give them to me while I continued to drive on. This would have saved us about 45 odd minutes I guess. Otherwise, we would have searched for some place, placed our orders, made payments etc and that definitely does take some time.

Somewhere around 4:30, a little before Jaipur, I thought the car was going a little haywire. She would either pull to the left or to the right. I suspected a puncture and got off to see. The tyres seemed to be absolutely fine. I got in again and after a couple of km felt the problem again. Got off to inspect but didn't find any problem at all. This was a little intriguing and pretty irritating. A little later, when the sunshine had reduced a bit, I realized that the road was the culprit. There were ruts formed in the road and these would pull the tyres along. Ouch and aaargh! The depth of these ruts constantly increased as we neared Jaipur and avoiding them seemed to be a better idea than speeding along. This slowed us down a bit.

Around this time, mom and I decided that it would make more sense to just continue driving and try and hit Gurgaon by 9:30 or so. We estimated that we would cross Jaipur by 5:30 and then since it would be about 220 km to Gurgaon (Delhi being 250 km from Jaipur), we could average about 60 and reach home by 9 - 9:30. We decided to tank up (got a mileage of 13.5 for the last stretch) and asked for a good restaurant at the petrol pump. The guy mentioned some Maharaja restaurant about 7 - 8 km ahead. We cruised along for close to 20 minutes and didn't find the place. We decided to pull into the next decent looking place which turned out to be the one the guy had mentioned. This was 13 km away from the petrol pump! The winzip effect extends to Rajasthan I guess.

Coffee, sandwich and a can of diet pepsi for me for the way taken care of, we moved on towards the last leg of the journey. And what a horrible last leg it was! We crossed Jaipur around 6:30. And landed up amidst a caravan of trucks that extended all the way to Delhi. It appeared that all the trucks of the country were going for a gathering at Delhi. Their incessant march had left a toll on the road and it was littered with potholes. And it also appeared that the truck gathering in Delhi had an early bird prize for the bunch of truckers because all of them seemed to be eager to overtake each other. At the previously mentioned warp speeds that too! Only that the warp speed had dropped down to 20kmph! Aaaaaargh!! We were by now getting pretty tired having spent more than 12 hours in the car. I was getting a little irritated as well and started resorting to hook or crook overtaking for a while. If you don't give me space on the right, I will try the left. If that doesn't work, I will try and blow your brains out with my horn. If that doesn't work either, you win (temporarily) and I crawl behind you till I see the next opening. We got stuck in a couple of jams along the way. Minor jams, but, at that time, it seemed to take up eternity to get away. There was hardly a stretch where I could stretch the legs of the car! 80 kmph seemed to be a distant dream and I was constantly changing gears between 2nd and 3rd sometimes having to go down to 1st too! And the NHAI nincompoops had the gall to collect a toll on those roads!




Calling Sonali To Tell Her We Were Coming



We did have our share of laughs too. There was this incident where my sis calls up mom. This is how the conversation goes:
Sonali: "Where are you folks now?"
Mom: "Kanishk, where are we?"
Me: " About 40 kms away".
Mom: "Sonali, we are about 40 kms away".
Sonali: "No no, where are you?"
Mom (after asking me): "Bhiwadi".
Sonali: "Ummm… where is that??"
I : "Duh!"

A little before Gurgaon, we came to this mother of all toll gates with a mother and grandmother and great grandmother of all queues ahead of it. We had to get stuck in the slowest lane (Murphy at it again!!). After a loong looong wait, we came to the booth and paid. I wanted to scream at them and ask them what right they had to collect toll for crappy roads but didn't considering that they were just the minions doing their duty. A little funny thing that we noticed about toll plazas was that the sign for an upcoming toll gate would always be 1.25 kms before the toll gate. Toll 1.25 km ahead was a standard signboard. We wondered why 1.25? Why not 2? Why not 1? Or why not 1.3? I suppose it must be something to do with speed and time. At 75 kmph, it takes 1 minute to cross 1 km. Is that the average speed people drive at and so get about a minute to prepare for the upcoming toll payment? I don't know and I still wonder what the reason is.

We entered Gurgaon around 10 and then called up to find the way to Sonali's place. We were supposed to take the ramp exit for IFFCO chowk. We somehow ended up taking the earlier exit as there was some confusion about the number of ramps to pass before getting off the expressway. After stopping several times and taking some of the worst roads in the city, we managed to come up near Maruti. I knew the way from there and was pretty glad to have reached a known landmark.

We reached home at 10:39. My niece (all of 7) and my nephew (all of 1.5 years old!) came running out to meet us. Their shouts of "Mamu mamu" just dissolved away the tiredness that we felt. We were a little skeptical that Neil would recognize us but he took to us instantly (I guess it's because Kriti just hugged us as soon as she saw us and wouldn't leave us at all). Our stuff stowed away in one corner of the house, we sat and played with the kids. Neil wouldn't go to sleep and wouldn't let Nani go to sleep either for a long time.

Happy to be home (and mor than a little tired), we finally went to bed way after the midnight chime. With the thought that I'd crossed another milestone in driving (having completed 1000+ kms in a day), I nodded off to sleep weary but smiling.

PS: Looks like A long day got a long post

Car Statistics:
Distance covered: 1048 kms
Time: 15:24 hours.

GPS stats:
Lost half an hours worth of data as I didn't realize that the battery had conked off
Trip odometer: 986km
Moving time: 12:50 hours
Stopped: 61 minutes.
Max speed: 128kmph
Moving avg: 76.8kmph
Overall avg: 71.1kmph
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Old 21st October 2009, 16:45   #22
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Were you the only one driving?
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Old 21st October 2009, 17:38   #23
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Originally Posted by ashishy View Post
Were you the only one driving?
I guess he was driving alone, Ashishy; at least his naration seems to suggest that. Quite a wonder—driving alone, 1,000 km a day.

Great travelogue. Keep it coming in...
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Old 21st October 2009, 17:39   #24
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Originally Posted by ashishy View Post
Were you the only one driving?
Yes. My mom doesn't know how to drive and anyways, I get glued to the steering wheel once I sit in the car
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Old 21st October 2009, 18:51   #25
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Originally Posted by yamraj View Post
Yes. My mom doesn't know how to drive and anyways, I get glued to the steering wheel once I sit in the car
Barring a few hundred KMs I also drove singly my entire trip.
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Old 21st October 2009, 19:30   #26
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Originally Posted by rajeevn View Post
I guess he was driving alone, Ashishy; at least his naration seems to suggest that. Quite a wonder—driving alone, 1,000 km a day.

Great travelogue. Keep it coming in...

Thanx for the compliments. Next couple of days coming up soon.

I'd posted my reply to ashishy earlier but being a newbie, my comments are moderated and it takes a while before they show up.
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Old 21st October 2009, 19:31   #27
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Wow.. nice writing dude. will read every word of your travelogue.

I will get in touch or even meet u sometime next year. I am planning the blr-leh-blr in aug or sept 2010 in my baleno with 2 other friends of mine.
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Old 21st October 2009, 19:56   #28
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Originally Posted by madhukar_n View Post
Wow.. nice writing dude. will read every word of your travelogue.

I will get in touch or even meet u sometime next year. I am planning the blr-leh-blr in aug or sept 2010 in my baleno with 2 other friends of mine.

Thanx

Feel free to contact me anytime for your planning.
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Old 22nd October 2009, 11:34   #29
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Originally Posted by yamraj View Post
Yes. My mom doesn't know how to drive and anyways, I get glued to the steering wheel once I sit in the car
amazing dude. Bookmarked the page. Will look at it before starting work everyday
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Old 22nd October 2009, 16:12   #30
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Originally Posted by ashishy View Post
amazing dude. Bookmarked the page. Will look at it before starting work everyday
Thanx

Theres been a slowdown due to work. Am working on the Delhi Manali bit now. Will try and post it by tomorrow.
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