| Mumbai-Shirdi-Mumbai Road Trip
We planned on going to Shree Sai Baba Temple in Shirdi on a Friday because Thursday is a day of heavy rush in the temple, as always before going on long road trips I pulled out my GPS a couple of days before to map out the route, I was not surprised when I did not find the Sai Baba Temple in the GPS, but one cannot completely rely on a GPS in India, There were times when we were taken to wrong places by completely relying on it, but also there were times when we drove to Banglore where the GPS was very helpful, It’s not that we don’t know the route to the temple but I prefer to have my GPS on on long road trips.
Anyway hoping that by starting early in the morning at 5:00 am we would avoid the heavy traffic, we managed to leave the house at 5:15 am, driving from Kandivali to Dahisar, it took about 10 minutes to the Dahisar Toll Naka where there was already a queue of 10 cars in front of us, after we crossed the Toll Naka the heavy vehicles traffic started, there were already Trucks and trailers and rickshaws and motor cycles at 5:40am on that road. As we are all aware the truckers love to drive on the right side of the road and the left side blocking both tracks so overtaking is impossible and one has no choice but to follow them patiently until they decide to give way.
The next traffic jam was at the Ahmedabad/Ghodbunder road junction, trucks, trailers, cars had got jumbled up at the traffic light here and everything had come to a standstill and no cop in sight, the signal was working but everyone was ignoring them as it didn’t make any sense to them whether it was green or red. Finally someone in a Khaki uniform arrived with half sleepy eyes and helped clear the jam, we easily lost a good 20 minutes here.
After clearing this jam we drove for about a kilometer and the traffic started slowing again and this time there was a line of hundred of trucks and trailers lined up in front of us moving at snail’s pace and sometimes not moving at all, this queue was for the Excise Naka on the Ghodbunder road , the truckers had blocked both tracks as usual and we were stuck again, again we lost another 30 to 40 minutes until I found a opening in the road divider and decided to cross and go to the wrong side of the road and follow the other private vehicles who were doing the same, driving through oncoming traffic until we crossed the Excise Naka.
We were finally relieved that we had crossed all the bottle necks and that we were on the highway hoping to gain on the lost time but no luck the highway was full of trucks and as usual sometimes blocking both tracks making overtaking impossible, no amount of honking or flashing your head lights is going to help, as the truckers don’t care, I have dual tone Red Grill Hella horns which I know are very loud but in vain and to add to the heavy traffic were the hundreds of Sai Baba devotees who were walking on the highway to the Shirdi Temple, there were also these support vehicles parked on the highway for these devotees providing them first aid and water etc which were hampering the smooth flow of traffic.
By this time the sun had come up and visibility was better , the road was now a proper 4 lane highway with 2 tracks on each side but beware we now we had to deal with oncoming traffic on the same track approaching us at high speeds, for kilometers there are stretches of road closed on either side for road work so either we had to go on the other side of the road and negotiate through the oncoming traffic or remember to keep on the left to let the oncoming traffic go through if we were on the right side of the road. You may be happily driving at 100kms an hour until suddenly you realize that you are on a head on collsion course with a trailer. Surprises are in plenty on Indian Highways.
This went on for quite some time, there are always surprises all the way through, people and trucks will jump on the highway without indication, trucks will suddenly slow down, some guys will be driving on the left side of the road but as you approach them to overtake they will suddenly change track, why cant people drive sensibly ?
The most enjoyable stretch of the highway was the Kasara Ghat stretch which is now one way so one can drive without any tension, the return journey on this stretch is similar to Mumbai-Pune Expressway.
After going through all this we finally reached the Shirdi temple around 11:00 am by this time the temple was already making announcements that the Darshan will be closed from 11:30 to 1:30 pm for Aarti., we rushed to the slipper and mobile stall to deposit our mobiles and shoes and joined the queue for the Darshan, there were already hundreds of devotees in the queue, in between the queue stopped moving as the hall was closed for aarti, in a couple of hours we got the darshan of Shree Sai Baba but the temple security guys are quite rude, they were rushing everyone out of the hall to make way for the other hundreds of devotees behind us, we hardly got to wait a few seconds in front of the Idol of Shree Sai Baba, devotees were literally being pushed out of the hall.
Satisfied that we got the darshan we then collected our shoes and mobiles and went to Hotel Goradia which is just a few minutes’ walk from the temple and had a good lunch. As we had to drive further to Singnapur to the Shani temple which is another 70 to 80 kilometers we left the Hotel around 3 pm, we reached there in about 90 minutes, there there was no rush and we got a good darshan of the idol of Shani devata.
Around 5:00 pm we started our return journey, this time we took the Sangamner-Ghoti route which is a shortcut, it cuts the distance by about 45 kms, I think. For most of the part the road was good and empty for a change but suddenly we would encounter bad patches for about 100 to 200 meters, by this time it was getting dark and we had to slow down every few kilometers whenever we encountered the bad patches on the road. On the way around 8:00 pm we found Hotel Musk (not a Hotel actually it was a restaurant) where we had a dinner and then proceeded on our return journey.
Driving through the dark of the night with head lights on high beam from oncoming vehicles is quite difficult and very tiring, I have installed a couple of Hella driving lamps on my vehicle myself and sometimes I had all my 6 lamps ON, the 2 original fog lamps, the 2 Head lamps and the 2 Hella Lamps not with the intention of blinding oncoming traffic but so I that I could see better.
We finally reached home at 1230 after midnight, after about 19 hours, I was quite tired, I didn’t expect that it would take so long, anyway it was a good trip, well satisfied with the darshan of Shree Sai Baba and the idol of Shani in Singnapur.
This weekend we will be driving to Pune to attend a party and then leave the next morning to drive to Ujjain and back.
Last edited by aah78 : 24th March 2010 at 02:01.
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23rd March 2010, 23:32
