Sunday, October 31, 2010

Journey from Mumbai to Delhi by Road

What comes in your mind when someone asks you a question - Do you like long drives? Most of the people I know consider a journey between Mumbai and Pune to be long and will always come up with a story of how they covered that distance in less than 3 hours... For me long drive is where your back gets stiff and when you walk its always with a limp because your bum has gone numb ...

I decided to take out my new car to a long long drive, as a family we decided to drive from Mumbai to Delhi for Diwali vacation. We decided to leave home at 11.45 am and pick my son from the school to save additional 30 minutes of waiting for bus to reach home but then we saw a female driver (no offenses to opposite sex) who forgot that she had parked the car in middle of the road and had gone out to pick her son from school and by the time she was back the traffic was backed up for more than 500 meters in all directions... lost few precious minutes on it. Started driving with very decent speed towards VAPI and was expecting quite a lot of traffic but we did cover very good distance for first 170km... came closer to Vapi and the trouble started because of expansion of existing 4 lanes to 6 lanes.. got stuck into heavy traffic for next 100 km and reached Surat in close to 5 and half hours.

Once Surat was crossed it was a dream come true on a car which had tons of torque to offer, we started picking up speed on the surat - baroda highway and overtaking every vehicle possible on the road. Road from Baroda to Ahmadabad is a dream for every car driver where highway is fenced and you don't expect a dog to come in front of you. We took exit for Nadiad where I had booked hotel "comfort world" which promised me a safe parking but to my amusement the safe part of the parking was the road :)... Person at front desk offered be a guarantee that nothing will happen to my car. I was in no mood to put my 30lacs car on the road on its 10th night... I decided to go back to the highway and go uptill Ahmadabad and stay up at Gateway hotel close to airport which offered me safe parking and good stay as well.

Day 2 was interesting where I started at 6am and covered most of my first 700 km via Udaipur, Chitaurgarh, Bhilwara and Jaipur in just 7hrs and 45 minutes including a 45 minute break for lunch. Drive in this stretch is beautiful with almost no traffic and road conditions excellent. Post Jaipur was another story, I joined the bypass and old jaipur highway at 3pm and expected to reach Gurgaon in 2 hrs as it was just 180km from that mark but the fun started with very heavy traffic ready to enter Delhi post 9pm (trucks are not allowed in delhi during day time)... every city, town or mohalla that came in between delayed us by good 30 minutes, a two hour journey finished in 6 hours and my overall fuel economy falling down from 16 kmpl to 14.5 kmpl. I reached Gurgaon at 9 pm after the struggle at the last toll booth.

Total Journey 1450km, time taken 23 hours with close to 100ltrs of diesel and toll of Rs. 980. It was surely a trip worth coming on even after the painful last stretch and I would recomend this route to all driving lovers...

Cities Covered : Mumbai - Vapi - Surat - Vadodhra - Ahmadabad - Udaipur - Chittorgarh - Bhilwara - Naseerabad - Jaipur - Gurgaon

2 comments:

  1. Hi

    Thanks for sharing your experiences. We have linked you page to our website Mumbai to Delhi

    looking forward to read your next writeup.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks KS, will be heading back on 6th and will write more about journey

    ReplyDelete