Back. And Of Long Drives & Roads

I’m got back just a few days ago from a road journey to Kerala and back. I’m undergoing Ayurvedic treatment for a chronic and long-standing lower back problem at a facility near Trichur town (okay, you can laugh out loudly about my mode of transport!) and this was a follow up visit I’ve been following this line of treatment since April this year, and for now let me just say that I’m a fervent evangelist for Ayurveda and alternate therapies. I hope to discuss this further over subsequent postings. And in case you’ve stopped laughing and have reached this far, this happens to be my third trip by the same mode of transport this year, just in case you really want to bust a gut. :o)

Unlike other times, this time there were a couple of additional places to be visited, one of which was Puttaparthi, the abode of Bhagavan Sathya Sai Baba. And the other being Rameswaram, the famed temple town in coastal Tamilnadu, for immersing my grandfather’s ashes. And as a consequence, I wound up getting exposed to a lot more road surfaces. Here are a few observations.

The national highways (NH) have almost completely been brought back to normal after the havoc the monsoons wreaked on them. I should know, my last trip was in end-August, smack in the middle of the monsoons and long sections of the road were more river-bed than anything motorable. That’s in the past now and the highways hold not too many hidden surprises. The Bombay Bangalore national highway (NH-4) is undergoing an amazing metamorphosis as part of the Golden Quadrilateral Project. For instance, the about 90-km stretch from Belgaum to the Maharashtra border makes the Bombay-Poona Expressway feel a little bumpy. And the 125 odd km from Hubli to Belgaum should be that way very soon. The section from Kolhapur to Poona is predominantly work-in-progress and so was exasperating in stretches, and this state of affairs is expected to continue for at least another year. But on the whole, from almost 7-years ago when I made my first similar road trip, things have come a long way. If the section from Hubli to Bangalore is anything like that between Kolhapur and Hubli, then with a good car, you could leave Bombay in the morning and be in Bangalore late in the evening in time to clean up and head out to the nightspots for a spot of drink and dancing!

The state roads are a completely different story altogether. So for instance, Karnataka had gets most points for how its kept the national highways but has possibly the worst state highways that I’ve experienced. Even Kerala, which gets least points for its national highway maintenance has better maintained state highways than Karnataka! My journey from Hubli to Puttaparthi via Bellary & Hampi was predominantly over Karnataka state highways, and easily stands out as the worst experience of this trip.

The highlight of this trip was the 60-odd km drive from Munnar in the hill country of Kerala to Bodi in the plains of Tamilnadu, by far the most delightful and taxing hill driving I’ve done (not that I’ve done too much actually). The roads are narrow, for better part a tightly squeezed 2-lanes, about 17 hairpin bends in the last 20 km. And a spectacular view all the way, descending nearly 5000 feet. Mercifully, the road surface was pretty decent unlike the 14-km descent from Wynad to Calicut, which I’d taken on the way in, which left me and the car much the worse for the experience.

In close second place was driving and also standing on the Indira Gandhi bridge connecting Rameswaram to the mainland (I didn’t know that Rameswaram was an island till then!). Also known as the Pamban bridge, this is 2.2 km long and is reportedly India’s longest bridge. You can see some rather spectacular photographs of this spectacular place here. Standing on the bridge, feeling the incredibly strong gusts of wind, the crystal clear waters, is something I’m not able to describe you’ll have to experience it yourself.

This was just a short apology of sorts for not having posted for the last few weeks. I hope to touch upon trip experiences in more detail over the coming days, but let me leave you with a parting thought. I personally felt that while the road modernizing did an amazing job of making travel smoother and faster, it also somehow sanitized the whole experience long stretches of roadside lost all character and personality and flavor. So you got from point A to point B faster and more comfortably, but the journey itself seems to have become more boring. Am I making sense? :o)