#2 From Goa to Siliguri — pt 1
Off we went. Siliguri, the gateway to the Northeast, was 2700 kilometres away and five days by road. I have never driven more than 300 kilometres by road in India before. Sure, me and my brother did a 8000-ish kilometer roadtrip coast-to-coast in the USA, but if the opposite of night is day, the opposite of black is white, then the opposite of the USA would be India (IMO, in every possible way). And so was this roadtrip experience — both trips were epochal experiences but they could not have been more different.
The first question everyone asked me when I told them about the trip I am planning was: If you can fly to Siliguri and rent a car/driver there, Why drive?
We don’t have a roadtrip culture in India. Unlike the USA, here, we prefer the rails and the air; and for the last mile, we take the road. That’s how I have always travelled in India, and that’s how most people I know do as well. Why? Because: the roads are terrible, drivers are boors (the “me first” culture of Indian driving, as Sunil Gavaskar once put it), traffic laws disobeyed with impunity, traffic jams are hellish, roadside emergency services is nonexistent.
A roadtrip, then, seems to be an unnecessary, foolhardy and eccentric undertaking; but what better way to learn about a land than from traversing across it — logging mile after mile on the odometer, talking to locals, drinking chai at a tea stall, clicking breath-taking landscapes one might chance across, eating at road-side dhabas. Also, by getting the bejesus scared out of myself in Uttarakhand by a taxi-driver(documented in full horror here), drivers-for-hire were no longer an option in my life. And this trip was going to be the template of all my future India trips — (only) On the Road. And soon I was to learn the truth of that oft-quoted cliche about India: “Every generalisation you can make about India, the opposite is also true.”
So, off we went. And within 60 kilometres of driving, I learnt my first lesson on road tripping. Don’t Trust Google.
Google misapprehends road trips. It is a machine. It can compute efficiencies but little else. It understands the shortest distance from point A to point B is a diagonal road; but doesn’t understand that the longer highway road is safer than a shorter (diagonal) village road whose potholes might break your car’s axle or your lower back’s vertebrae. It’s an American app built for Americans, imported to India, but unrepresentative of our realities. And we ended up trudging up the winding Amboli ghats, instead of speeding across a plush 4-lane highways of the Belgavi route, while taking in a few village roads that did a number on my spine.
Thankfully, Amboli was gorgeous. We stopped at scenic “point” for some chai and vada pav while taking in the valley views. A dozen monkeys kept us company, eyeing our vadapav, while we hastily scrunched them down. The scenery was dry and dusty, nevertheless pretty; Amboli ghats are best visited in the Monsoon.
We only managed to reach Kolhapur before it turned dark. We found a hotel for the night adhering to the #1 of the two ironclad rules of this trip: No Night Driving; the other rule being “Don’t take Panga” aka No Road Rage. Day 1: 187 kilometres.
Day 2 began very early. 5AM.
Eschewing Google, we began using MapMyIndia and Apple Maps both of whom advised us to travel via Nashik instead of Nagpur (our original plan). To resolve the dilemma — because the new route was 500km longer — at 5:30am, I called the Road Trip King of our family, our big cousin, M. M was doing a roadtrip of his own to Bandhavgarh Tiger Sanctuary; and I was sure, he must be awake and already driving. Turns out he wasn’t. He called me back around 6, and gave me the green signal for the new route, and so onward we went.
Our new route, blessed by Apple Maps, was longer by at least 350kms (almost a day’s worth of driving), going up North via Indore to Lucknow and then going East via Muzaffarpur into Siliguri (once again a rectangular route, not a shorter diagonal route). But it was full of double-digit National Highways — NH-48, NH-52, NH-60) — and a big significant chunk was the Asian Highway (AH-1). It was easier to traverse, and easier on the driver’s lower back, and a sharp contrast to our American roadtrip. In our coast-to-coast American roadtrip in 2015, we eschewed the multi-lane Interstate-highways for smaller and more “scenic” routes as marked green in our National Geographic Atlas (alas, such atlases for Indian roads are unavailable).
But it would be misleading to assume that taking bigger interstate highways in India would be dull. In fact any Indian highway, even the extravagantly nomenclatured ”Asian Highway” are packed with surprising sights, every minute, every hour, even for the most benumbed everyday commuter. The overpacked buses, the artwork and motifs of overloaded lorries, the often bizarre scenes on the roads — we saw a horse fully-decked up for a marriage procession being trotted alongside a motorcycle by two men, the back-seater holding the horse’s reins and smiling back at me as we passed.
Also there was no dearth of scenery, it was everywhere. Even in the NHs. Approaching Nashik, India’s wine capital, the landscape around us was painted in bright greens and magic yellows of the vineyards. The road was skinny, and canopied, arched by bushy green trees, rejuvenating tired drivers passing underneath with a whiff of nature’s poetry. And as we approached Dhule, the green vineyards gave way to mountains and their various forms: hillocks, buttes and mesas, brownish-red with patches of green, reminiscent of dusty red landscapes of an Old Western set in Monument Valley. But unlike the West, here, one could spot a small temple with a flying red flag nestling atop the mesa.
In the USA, this area would have been cordoned off into a national park, with a million visitors a year paying 20$ a pop to see the rock formations; but in India, no one even spared a second glance; and one could see ugly buildings, unsightly electrical poles and wires and strewn garbage everywhere as we approached the town nestling below these hills.
Our day ended as the clock struck 6, with a lot of scrambling to find an half-decent hotel in the middle of nowhere, post-Nashik. Eventually we settled in a nice hotel in Malegaon, rooms were okay, and ended the night gorging on a Cheese Roomali Khakhra recommended by a friendly Bihari waiter, who after a sojourn in Goa, had ended up at Hotel Radhika in Malegaon.
Post dinner, we crashed with exhaustion at 8:30PM.
