The odometer closed at 2,570 km, which is 170 more than the plan and roughly what happens when lunch detours and a second breakfast get a vote. Nine days on the road took us through Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, a corner of Rajasthan, and Delhi. We dropped two halts from the original plan, Jabalpur and Agra, and stuck to the rest.
The earlier posts covered the forests. What I haven’t written about is the part in between, and the main thing I learned there is that every state hands the road to someone different.
In Bangalore it belongs to nobody, which is the problem. We left late because of the rain and paid for it in city traffic before the trip had properly started. Hyderabad’s ring road, later that day, was a breeze and felt several budget cycles ahead of ours.
Madhya Pradesh was a different beast. The national highway was fine. The state roads and village stretches were acceptable in parts and battlegrounds in others, with no notice of which was coming. On the highway you dodge motorists and cattle both, and every now and then we passed a cow nobody had dodged. The gau rakshaks, it seems, never got the memo about highways.
A memo that did go out, back in 2019, declared India open defecation free. Drive through central India at 5 am and your headlights run their own survey: people squatting by the roadside, rising as the beam reaches them. I didn’t need the drive to know this. Around some Bangalore lakes you can be waiting on a bird when a ‘Brown-bellied Indian’ gets up from behind the next bush, entirely unhurried, definitely not a ‘lifer’.
In Uttar Pradesh the road belongs to bikers. They can come at you from any direction, and after a while I stopped ruling out the sky. Then, near Agra, people did start falling out of it, under parachutes, in what must have been a military training exercise. So I wasn’t far off, except that none of them were on bikes.
Enter Noida and the Thars and Fortuners remind you who the boss is, purely through driving style. The evening traffic inside the city was bumper to bumper and still moving, a combination Bangalore has not yet attempted.
Between all of this, the journey belonged to the animals. Seven safaris produced four tigers, four leopards, two sloth bears and five jackals, on top of the usual mammals and a long list of birds. That is a good count for people who showed up on 1 October, the day the parks reopened. Sightings tend to improve after the 15th, once the guides have caught up with who is moving where, so either we got lucky or the tigers had been sent our dates.
Safaris are exhausting on paper: 4:30 am alarms, long hours, long distances at low speed. They also slow you down, and the forest department deserves some of the credit. Tadoba, Pench and Panna all ban mobile phones inside the core areas. I suspect we brought this on ourselves. We are a loud people who film everything, and it was only a matter of time before someone pushed a phone into a tiger’s mouth for the close-up. So mine stayed in the room each morning. I don’t keep many notifications on anyway, but having none at all for a whole day is oddly liberating. For hours I looked only at what I had come to look at.
I have done a few road trips and this was the longest. Strangely, it was not taxing at all, and the reasons are mostly things I can’t take credit for. The weather held, with no real heat and no rain once we were past Bangalore’s city limits. NH44 gave us long, decent stretches. A tiger reserve every few hundred kilometres turns out to be a good way to break up a drive. And Adarsh wants more or less what I want from a trip, which matters far more in hour thirteen than in hour one.
The same goes for being able to take the trip at all. I work for myself, so nobody had to sanction nine days of leave, and that alone puts a drive like this out of reach for most people I know with office jobs. Many of the people we drove past will never have the money to spend a week looking at animals. The trip also ran on other people’s early mornings: the guides and drivers who were at the gate before we were, the resort staff packing our breakfast at 5AM, the forest department staff keeping it tight day in day out.
One would think, the holiday has come to an end. I now fly to Goa to join six others on the coast, a holiday after a holiday. I am grateful for all of it, and as an atheist I can only address that to ‘whom it may concern’.
