7500 KM. 15 days on the road. About 140 hours of driving on the road. A mileage of around 11 kilometers per liter of diesel in a car that is 15 year old and had already driven more than 300,000 kilometers. All these are mesmerizing figures, however they are just figures, what is exciting is what happens in the middle of these figures. The way I would like to describe this trip would be, from ‘Dal Roti’ to Aloo Paratha to Sweet Sambar to Spicy Chicken to Pastas and all the way back. Or from the dirty streets of Delhi to the beautiful roads of South India.
As we left Delhi I was excited to do this trip as I love to sit in the car and travel for as long as possible. My parents say all I care is that there should be movement and that too on wheels and that keeps me happy and this is nothing new, this has been the case since the last seventeen years of my life, whenever my parents wanted to put me to sleep, they would take me for a ride in our Maruti 800 and I would be asleep within the next few moments, so the love for cars and road trips is nothing new, what is new is the different experiences I gain from it each time I take a road trip. And this trip by far has been the greatest learning experience of them all. It taught me the diversity of India in its foods, architecture, language, culture, topography, hygiene, cleanliness, and of course the weather. It made me realize how great our country really is, you will find all types of people here and I literally mean it, there are just so many of us here in this vast nation – vast not just by area but by the richness of our cultures, religions, languages, dialects, dresses, behaviour, habits, practices, belief, rituals, food, plates, pickles, culinary, gestures, taste of water, politics, field, colours of soil, hills, grass, and so on.
We traveled from British India to French India through Mughal, Rajputana and Deccans of India, it cannot get better than this! I could see the difference between British architecture (in Delhi), Sultanate period architecture (Delhi), Rajasthani architecture (Neemrana, Bijainagar, Chittorgarh), Buddhist architecture (Ellora), South Indian architecture (temples and statues at every 10 to 15 km), Dutch architecture (Tranquebar) and finally French architecture (Pondicherry).
We traveled from Hindi to Hindi with a Haryanvi accent to the sharp Rajasthani Hindi, to the head moving gestures of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra Hindi/Marathi to Telugu to Kannada to Tamil. While coming back we also experienced the soothing Hyderabadi Hindi and the harsh UP Hindi, much like their roads I must say!
We crossed the plains of Delhi and Haryana and went into the dunes of Rajasthan and as we traveled on we entered the plains of Madhya Pradesh and then the mix of plains and plateaus in Mahrashtra and further into the mix of absolutely everything in Andhra and Karnataka and finally into Tamil Nadu.
I must thank Bijo and Rohit for making our trip more interesting by adding village roads and district and state highways on our route, this helped us get closer to the people, especially in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana where I had barely traveled by road before. Bijo’s quiet yet humorous company kept us going and Rohit’s logistics and advise with the routes and the documentation of the trip made it much easier and interesting for us.
I would like to thank Ali for providing us with the young, inexperienced traveler that made the trip a lot better and entertaining for us. I believe he gained as much from the trip as we gained from his presence. His constant questions made me question some things myself and having someone who looks at things from such a different perspective was very important for the trip.
I must thank and congratulate Jasbir Uncle for the feat he achieved. 7000 km driving in 13 days is no joke and he bear with our sudden changes in plan and took whatever was thrown at him, be it waking up at 4 in the morning or driving till 2 at night, doing 400 km on horrible roads in a day or 850 km of amazing roads. I believe he also gained a lot from this trip as he got to travel to Central and South India where he had never gone before and probably wouldn’t have gone but because of this trip. And in the short interval that the car was in Pondicherry, he traveled on three modes of transport he hadn’t done before – airplane, train and bus.
I would like to thank my parents for gifting me this trip for my birthday; this is the best birthday gift I have ever gotten. They helped make the trip much better by taking photos all through the trip and supporting me despite their hardships such as body pains. They took care of all the logistics and cost which removed all the worries for me, I could entirely focus on soaking in this amazing road trip.
And finally I would like to thank my dear old Qualis that took the worst roads without a problem, went at whatever speeds we demanded and the best of all she made us all comfortable inside while taking on everything by herself and what surprises me most is that even though its done over 3,20,000 km, we had no complains from her despite what we put her through.
The Destination In The Journey 