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When you plan a trip, especially the ones which are very long and to unknown destinations through unknown roads, you expect lots of surprises to happen to you. Neeraj and I planned to have a road trip to some place around Bangalore. Both of us were free last weekend and Neeraj also took a day and half off. So we had some four days in hand. Few places like Coorg, Ooty and even Pondicherry came into consideration. But the place where both of us wanted to go was GOA. Neeraj did the planning part. Maps of Karnataka and Goa were arranged, Net was searched for road maps and tourist destination en route. As Goa was 650 Kms away from Bangalore, we were a bit skeptical about going there but we had a beach called Gokarna in our minds, which was some 500Kms away from Bangalore and Jog falls was in that route itself. So the plan was pretty much set. Visit Jog Falls and Gokarna and come back. But life never runs as per your plans, so things went a bit different than we thought it to be. I will try to recollect all what happened to us and the trip during those four days of travel on day by day basis.
Day 1, 19 Jun 09, Friday:
Neeraj took a half day off from office and that was the best decision he made during this journey. We could manage to start our trip at 1430hrs from Old Airport Road. First destination was a small town called Nelamangla. This was a small town just outside Bangalore but is very important junction for traffic movement. Till this place you will get huge traffic. There is one road at the end of this town which goes towards Mangalore which pulls all the traffic towards itself. So post Nelamangla, traffic is descent. From here to Tumkur, the road was ok wild mild traffic. After driving few kms we realized that almost all small and big cities had one road that entered the city while there was one bypass road. These bypass roads saved a lot of time for us. So when you are entering a city, just ask local people as to which road is bypass and take that. Infact we skipped the Tumkur city and touched the highway again at 10 km away from town called Gubbi. As per our plan we had to reach Shimoga by eod. We had cities like Tiptur,Arsikere,Kadur and Bhadravati on NH 206 in the way to Shimoga. Bhadravati is a steel city have a SAIL steel plant there. Beautiful Township. We reached Shimoga district at 2030hrs. It took us one hour to reach hotel Jewel Crown where we had a booking for a night stay. Book the room in advance coz this hotel was real crowded even in the off season. The road till s
Shimoga was good. Mostly two lane roads with no partition, but the traffic was not much so driving was never an issue.
Day 2, 20 Jun 09, Saturday:
We woke up at 6 in the morning. The next destination was Jog Falls. Come out of the hotel, take a left turn and you are on your way to Sagar, the next town en route. Sagar is very important destination for this trip. Make sure that you take your breakfast here. Buy some snacks as well and most importantly, get you car tank full here. There were no petrol pumps in that 150 km ghat section that stretches from Sagar to Honnavar. There is a HP Pump in the sagar city on the right hand side of the road. We started off for Jog Falls at 0700hrs from Sagar. The road was till Jog was nice with few bad patches here and there. But yet again No traffic. The road is narrow and there are some sharp turns and hairpins also so make sure that you drive slowly, you are always on the left side of road and you keep honking your horn at turns. We reached Jog falls at 0900hrs. The view was awesome. We were at the first tourist destination of our journey, so the sense of achievement was making up prouder. As this was June, so there was a very thin line of water flowing down the falls. But then the view was amazing. We left for Honnavar at 1000hrs. This was a continuation of the ghat section. But the road was much narrower and curvaceous this time. Most of the times we were passing through a narrow, one lane road with jungle on the both side of us. There was deafening silence all across. That’s what we call nature at its best. The journey continued through Honnavar, Kumta and we reached Gokarna at 1230hrs. Gokarna is 10km off the highway. There are four beaches and a famous temple called Mahabaleshwar temple which can be visited. Enter the town and go straight, you will reach the temple and the Gokarna Beach. Temple and the prasadam offered there was awesome. The Gokarna beach is not that beautiful though. The most beautiful beach of the area is OM beach which is some 4 kms away from the town. Instead of going straight into the town, if you take a left and go straight, you will reach the Om Beach. There is a Namaste guest house on the beach. Book your hut in advance for 600 Bucks a day. This beach is named so because of its shape which resembles Om when written in hindi. That was a beautiful rocky beach. There was something very unique with the beach. The beach was divided into two sections by a huge rock. There was lots of wave formation in one part while it’s was exceptionally smooth of the other side. This place was silent and serene and we decided to stay back there for the night. We met two South African nationals there at the café. Dave and Rejanna were on a trip to India for one long year. We talked for some 2 hours and I was surprised with their knowledge of Indian politics. As there stay in India was long and without any plans we offered them a ride to Goa with us which they happily accepted. Don’t get surprised, we decided to go Goa the next morning coz we realized that we were very close and it would be fun. At 12 midnight we all went to bed with plans to hit g
Goa the next day.
Day 3, 21 Jun 09, Sunday:
We woke up at 6 again. We had a plan to leave Gokarna by 0700hrs. We hit the highway at 0715 and by 0745 we were at Ankola. We had our breakfast there with our new travel mates, Dave and Rejanna. The one difference between yesterday’s drive and today’s drive was that today we were talking a lot in the car. Lots of talks on culture, tradition, music, education and world of other things were going on between us, that is what happens when people from two different world meet. We resumed our journey on the same highway and reached Karwar. Karwar is a famous port town on the western coast on India. It took as some 20 more minutes on the road from there and we entered the state of Goa. There is a striking difference between the people and culture of the two states and it was clearly visible. As we did not have much time to visit all parts of Goa, we decided that we would touch only southern Goa. Our next destination was Margaon, the second most famous town of Goa after Panjim. Goa is a small state and the towns and cities are very close to each other. Roads at Margaon are very confusing, so make sure that you ask locals for path and confirm them also from others. Out next stop was Colva Beach. The biggest beach in South Goa and possibly the dirtiest. The stretch was very long. We had our lunch and a seaside dhaba. I don’t remember the name of that dhaba, but the food was good. They had lots of options for non-vegetarians. After having a great food there we started off for our final destination in goa, Banaulim beach. This was a beautiful secluded beach, one km south of Colva. Instead of going for hotels which are some 500m away from the beach we went for a shack which was on the beach itself. Go to the main beach, take a left turn and walk 300m, you will get a series of shacks. They charged us just 200 bugs per day which was cheap by Goan standards. The surrounding was clean, serene and full of foreigners. This was the first time that we went into the sea in Goa. The evening became special because of the stupendous view that a rising storm created. The evening was all dedicated to World Cup T20 Finals between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As neither India nor SA were in the finals, we along with our travel mates enjoyed the whole match without any fight .
Day 4, 22 Jun 09, Monday:
Yet again, we woke up at 6. It was then that we realized that we were some 670Kms away from our homes and we had to drive all the way back home in one day. The Road that we took for the up journey was good and had less traffic also but it was slow. Slow because of the long stretch of ghat section and just two lanes of main highway. We decided to take an alternate path back home. The plan was to drive back till Ankola and then take a left turn to reach Sirsi. Sirsi was on the other side of ghat but this path had only 50 kms of ghat section. We said our goodbyes to out travel mates and started our journey. After reaching Sirsi the roads went a bit confusing. We took all the countryside roads which were not mentioned in the map. Because of that we had to ask a lot of people. But then after lots of confusion and even a fear that we are lost, we reached Haveri, the place where we touched NH4. This was Mumbai-Pune-bangalore highway, a part of the Golden Quadrangle project. It was 0130 when we reached Haveri. Had our lunch at a road side dhaba and we resumed the journey. There were no tourist destinations in this path and the only thing that we were supposed to do was to drive. The road was amazing. 6 lanes at most of the places and 4 lanes at times. We hit the max speed of our journey, which was 140kmph, in this stretch itself. Parts of this highway are under construction, so there are a lot of diversions and crossings on the road. From Haveri to Devangere, there was a bad patch of road also. But the post Devangere till Tumkur through Chitradurga, it was pleasure driving there. The road was as smooth as butter and traffic was as fast as F1. We reached Tumkur at 1830hrs. We took a break at Tumkur as we were sure that the coming 3 hours from Tumkur to Bangalore through Nelamangala was not going to be fun. And it happened as per expectation; I will define that 3 hour as the worst part of our journey. We reached home by 2200hrs. Ordered a Pizza, could eat just half of it and had a great sound sleep.
Trip Stats:
1. 1300 Kms Roundtrip.
2. 4 days in total of travel and stay.
3. 31 hours of driving (approx)
4. 17 kmpl of mileage.
5. 140 kmph as the max speed hit.
6. Unlimited fun
