"Drive down to Goa and back? With Radhika and Avinash? Without a driver? In a single day each way? You must be crazy." That was the first reaction of most of my friends when I told them that the three of us intended to drive down to Goa and back during the 5 day break that most Bombayites managed at the end of August / beginning of September this year. The 5 day break was of course made possible due to Ramzan and Ganesh Chaturthi falling on consecutive days (Wednesday and Thursday - hooray for Indian secularism!!), implying that a 5 day break was possible by just taking Friday off. The moribund condition of markets also made it possible to actually disappear for 5 days, without impacting business too much.
As all of you know, I am extremely fond of driving. Ever since I got my Skoda Superb in May 2010, I have been itching to take it on a long road trip. The fun I had driving long distances in Scotland during our holiday in 2010 only whetted my appetite for more driving holidays. When we started planning our US holiday in June this year, I had originally penciled in State Route 1 in California as a must do - only to postpone that once we decided to stick to the East Coast. The fact that Avinash and Radhika also seem to enjoy road trips encouraged me. However, driving on Indian roads is not always pleasurable or safe. The longest distance I had ever driven in India was just 325 km, from Bangalore to Coonoor in Amma and Appa's Santro, back in 2004. And driving to Goa (over 600 kms) would be more than 50% longer than the longest I had ever driven on a single day - 250 miles, or 400 km from Inverness to Edinburgh via the Great Glen, Fort William, Loch Lomond and the outskirts of Glasgow. Hence, before setting off, I started doing detailed research on what a drive to Goa would entail.
My first port of call was a car crazy friend, Ghanashyam, who has done several trips to Goa (and even a couple to Mangalore, his home town). "Driving to Goa. Its a breeze.", he said. "Just start at 5 am, and you should make it there by 330 or 4 PM". Ghanashyam of course is the kind of guy who can take the CR2 parking lot ramp at 40 kmph, do 180 kmph on the Bombay Pune expressway, and slice through traffic like Vettel passing Karun Chandok. So his time estimates had to be taken with a pinch of salt. But clearly if he could make it by 330 or 4, I should be able to make it by 7 pm, I thought. Further research was done on an Indian car freak web-site, team-bhp.com. There was a detailed thread on the Goa route, and it very quickly emerged that the best route to Goa was to take the Bangalore highway (NH 4) till somewhere between Kolhapur and Belgaum, and then divert via Amboli Ghat to Sawantwadi on the Maharashtra Goa border. The direct Bombay Goa road is shorter, but has just a single carriageway, and monsoon road conditions could be quite unpredictable.
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The next question was where to stay. The last time we went to Goa, we stayed at the Taj Holiday Village, in North Goa. But Bombayites plan their long weekends well in advance, and the Holiday Village did not have rooms at anything resembling a reasonable cost. The other major North Goa resort, the Fort Aguada was fully booked as was the Park Hyatt in South Goa. But surprisingly, there were relatively cheap rooms available at the Leela in South Goa (which is usually the costliest resort in Goa) - mainly because the resort is undergoing a renovation. A few quick checks revealed that the renovation was not really intrusive, and hence I made our bookings there. Booking at the Leela when you fly to Goa is a no brainer... Dabolim Airport is in South Goa, and just about an hour from the Leela. But while driving from Bombay, this meant that I would need to drive about 70 kms more than the distance to the North Goa resorts.
The final step in the planning phase was to prepare for the journey. My role was limited to getting the car ready, which involved checking that the tires (including the spare) were okay and inflated, that coolant and brake fluid levels were fine, and that I was stocked with a 1 litre can of Shell Helix Ultra. (The Volkswagen Group's ultra modern, turbo charged, direct injection petrol engines tend to drink oil like old Morris Minors). Radhika as usual had the tougher job, packing for the three of us, visiting Chedda Stores at Matunga to buy snacks for the journey, and with Amma's help, getting hot food (rotis and idlis) prepared for the journey.We set a hard deadline of 5 am for us to leave for Goa, knowing that with Avinash around, we would need to take more than our fair share of breaks, and that we would have to travel a long way through Goa to reach our hotel. My objective was to complete the NH 4 stretch till Kolhapur by 1130 or 12 noon, which would ensure that we had sufficient time to drive through the narrow ghat road from Sankeshwar through Amboli to Sawantwadi, and reach our hotel by 7PM or so.
August 31, 2011 - Bombay to Goa
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| About to leave |
We woke up as per plan at 345 am, and started getting ready to leave. However, despite our best efforts, by the time we were all in the car, it was 520 am. As we exited our building, Radhika realized that we had forgotten our packet of rotis - hence, we had to return to the building to pick them up. Our departure time was thus effective 5:30 am - we had lost 30 minutes even before we started. Long weekends tend to be terrible from a traffic perspective, and this day was no exception. Even at 530 in the morning, there was a lot of traffic on the road from Parel towards Chembur.
We made slow but steady progress (avg 45 kmph) till we reached Vashi, but the drive down Palm Beach Road was a relief. Soon, we reached the expressway, and made extremely rapid progress till the first toll booth at Khalapur. There was a massive crowd at the toll booth, which was a precursor for things to come. The next section of the Bombay Pune expressway along Khandala Ghat follows the same alignment as the old Bombay Pune road. Truck and car traffic was heavy, with trucks trying to overtake each other at under 25 or 30 kph, and blocking faster traffic. Where I got the space, driving was a pleasure - with my car climbing the ghat at 120 kph with the engine gently ambling along at 3000 rpm in D6. But the overall section till Karla was extremely crowded, and we could average only 45 kph on this stretch.
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| Khandala Ghat - a rare clear stretch |
Beyond Karla, the proper expressway resumes, and we once again made rapid progress. It took just 15 minutes to cover the next 30 kms to the Talegaon exit, where we took our first break to eat the breakfast of Idlis that Amma had packed for us at about 725 am. We managed to keep this break down to 20 minutes, and shortly thereafter, we exited the Expressway - at this stage we had managed to get our average speed up to almost 70 kmph, which was the highest that it would touch. Despite the traffic, our Bombay Pune time had not been worse than what we had anticipated.
Even though it was just before 8 am when we hit the Pune bypass, it seemed as if the entire town was out on the streets. The two lane bypass section was extremely crowded. After a quick tank up near Pune, we continued on our way, and it took 45 minutes to cover the 32 km Pune urban section.
Once we crossed Pune, the road was less crowded, but overall traffic was still high between Pune and Satara. The other big issue is the toll booths, which do not have enough lanes, often witness negotiations between MUV drivers and the toll attendants (fortunately, no shootings as witnessed in Gurgaon yesterday), and result in a dramatic loss of time. Between Pune and Kolhapur, there were 5 toll booths, and we lost an average of about 7-8 minutes in each of them. In the second toll booth we came to, at Anewadi, there was a traffic warden directing cars into an extra South bound toll lane (which had been opened by converting one of the North bound lanes). As I tried to get into that lane, a truck tried to close the gap down, and I swerved , ending inches from an ST bus. I stopped, but at that instant, the bus tried to start, and rolled back a few inches, knocking my LHS rear view mirror off. Avinash was distraught at seeing the damage caused to the car - I would have been upset too, but realized that we probably got away lightly - a few inches one way or the other and the car body could have been damaged. After Karad, the road opened out, and we managed to average 70 kph on the last 80 kms to Kolhapur. We reached Kolhapur at about 1230 pm, more or less on time given that we had started 30 minutes late. We had taken 3 hours 40 minutes to cover 220 kms between Pune and Kolhapur, and at least 40 minutes of that time was wasted at toll booths.
There is a McDonalds and Cafe Coffee Day just off the highway on the Kolhapur bypass, and this is the suggested lunch halt for all people traveling towards Bangalore from Bombay. We, of course, had our lunch - but used the parking lot of the McDonalds to eat it. Since we wanted to use the facilities there, we also ended up ordering some Ice Cream at the McDs, and before we realized it, we had spent almost one hour stationary there. About 2 kms from the McDonalds, we reached the famous Konduskar Petrol Pump, and refueled there. (Given the extent of adulterated fuel found on Indian highways, people driving modern petrol cars in particular are well advised to make note of all reliable petrol pumps on their route, and refuel only at those locations.) About 8 kms from Kolhapur, we crossed in Karnataka, and immediately, the road quality improved dramatically. 
Our speed picked up, and the distance to Tawandi Ghat (about 10 km from the town of Nipani), which is the location of the first turn off towards Amboli was covered in short order. We skipped this turnoff (which leads towards a town called Uttur) since the web-site that we had looked at advised against it, and proceeded a further 20 kms to a town called Sankeshwar, from where we turned off towards another small town called Gadhinglaj. The stretch from the Karnataka border to Sankeshwar was probably the nicest stretch of the entire journey - a combination of superb roads and beautiful undulating, green landscape, which inspired Radhika to pick up her EOS 550D and shoot a few snaps. We probably covered this 40 km stretch in about 20 minutes.
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| Misty Amboli |
Amboli is one of the many fabulously beautiful but virtually unknown monsoon destinations that abound in Maharashtra. It is famous for its waterfalls - on our way back, Avi counted 15 falls by the road before getting bored. We stopped briefly to see the falls, but there was a large holiday crowd of mostly drunk folks around, and we left after a very short break. There had been a major landslide at Amboli in late June, and shortly after the waterfall, there was a 500 metre stretch where the road was just mud and gravel. But after that, the rest of Amboli ghat was really nice, and oncoming traffic had reduced considerably. The only issue was that I was stuck behind an Alto that was driving along at 25 kph and on the twisty ghat section, I did not dare overtake, even if I could have driven about 15 kph faster. It therefore took an hour to cover the 30 kms from Amboli to Sawantwadi. A combination of the twisty ghat roads, and the long, virtually non stop drive since Kolhapur made Radhika feel extremely queasy, and we therefore stopped at Sawantwadi for some tea even though it was already 4:45 PM and I was not keen on driving for too long beyond sunset. We ended up spending about 45 minutes on this break.
After Sawantwadi, we were on NH 17, the Bombay Goa road. A bypass of Sawantwadi town is currently being constructed, and hence the existing road is heavily neglected. The roads near Sawantwadi were extremely narrow, and filled with deep craters. After about 10 km of this, we reached the point where the bypass construction was on - and to our amazement, the road quality became even worse. The 16 km from Sawantwadi to the Goa border took over 30 minutes. We crossed into Goa at 6 PM. Once we entered Goa, the road surface was super smooth, but the road remained a single carriageway for most part. Further, it had been raining very heavily for 3 days prior to our departure from Bombay, and once we entered Goa, the rain returned with a vengeance. Finally, after over 12 hours on the road, I was tired, and hence chose to stick behind slow moving buses and trucks, overtaking only on double carriageway sections or where the driver ahead took pity on me and slowed down to let me pass.
The sun set shortly after we passed Panjim, and the high beam lights of oncoming traffic made driving even tougher. Further, I was not exactly sure of how we should get from Madgaon to our hotel - hence about 10 km from Madgaon, I interrupted Radhika who was on a long call with Vidu, and asked her to call the hotel for directions instead. The hotel told us to take a turnoff from the highway towards Colva Beach, and that the rest of the way was posted. By the time we reached this turn-off, it was 7:30 PM. We made the turn, and kept going towards Colva, until we realized that we were almost at the Beach. It was pouring, and there was not a soul on the road. Fortunately, there was a lone shop open, and we managed to get directions from the shopkeeper, we had to travel back about 200 metres, and go through a series of narrow roads, before getting to the road heading for the Leela.
I had managed to borrow an old Garmin India map from a friend - but it was clearly useless - it was not aware of even sections of the National Highway, much less these narrow streets. At this point, we turned to the Google maps on my Samsung Galaxy S, which turned out to be far more accurate, and with Radhika navigating, we got onto the long straight road that leads to the Leela. While it was pitch dark and pouring, someone (I presume the hotels on the road including the Taj Exotica, Holiday Inn, Radisson Blu and the Leela) had ensured that there were reflectors on both sides of the road, and driving was therefore not difficult. Finally, at 8:23, having covered 655 kms in a little less than 15 hours door to door (with about 2 hours 15 minutes of halts on the way), we were at the Leela. It was an exhilarating journey, and I was glad that we had made it with only a minor mishap.
Our room itself was fantastic - it had two sections, one with a master bed, and a small sitting area where a smaller bed (perfect for Avi) had been laid out. Best of all, there were separate TVs for Avi and us - and Cartoon Network was available.
It would be extremely wrong of me to end the narrative of this day without commenting on Avi's exemplary behavior during our journey. Barring the halts at Talegaon, Kolhapur and Sawantwadi, he asked for only one other break, and kept himself and us amused with his comments throughout the journey. Clearly, this is one kid who loves the long road trip. For those interested in road trip speed stats, one final picture.
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