November 15th
We left from New Delhi early in the morning to avoid the typical traffic of a metro. Initially the roads were very confusing – small lanes full of Indian spices, trucks unloading the daily commodities everywhere, vendors getting their shops ready for the day – Delhi has its own way of getting congested early in the morning. While being stuck in one such lane, we pulled out Google Maps again and this time zoomed in quite a bit to see if there were any small by-lanes that we could use to avoid the market rush. That is when we found out that there were in fact a lot of cheap places we could have stayed in for the night had we zoomed into the map when we were looking for directions the prior night. There was a Ginger outfit right behind the petrol pump we slept at, a couple of cheap lodges a lane parallel to the pump and a lot of other places too. But bygones be bygones, we found the easiest way out to Gaziabad which in turn would put us on route to the Corbett National park.
These sections of the national highway look inviting, but are, again, quite dangerous to drive on. There are a lot of unofficial intersections that the locals have dug up in the highway dividers. This not only helps them make sudden appearances onto the road when you least expect it, but also helps them in proving the theory that humans evolved from a bunch of rogue monkeys!
Speaking of monkeys, the highway after Ghaziabad is infested with many of them sitting on the side of the road, eagerly waiting for tourists to offer them some food. We continued our march on this highway until the road signs for the Corbett National park finally started showing up. A few diversions later, we reached Muradabad. From here, our next destination was Kashipur. Once you get on the road between these two, you are hound to fall in love with your city road once again, no matter how they are. The road from Muraadabad to Kashipur is the very definition of ‘bad Indian roads’. Volkswagen claims to have tested and optimised the Polo for the fabled Indian roads? I bet they never came here, else they would have launched the Touran instead of the Polo in India. After crawling at speeds of 10km/h to give the Palio company, we were fed up yet again. We asked around to somehow find out how long this bad patch would last and prepare our minds accordingly. But everyone who met, only kept telling this patch is bad only till a certain petrol pump and when asked about the distance, all that they could say was ‘yehi kuch dus menut duur hai (just about ten minutes away)’. We continued crawling at a snail’s pace. And they, suddenly, on the exit of a small turn, hidden behind a few shrubs was the fabled petrol pump! Since we were not sure what lay for us up ahead, we tanked up both the cars here and continued to Ramnagar – a little town that would be our resource bunker for the next few days…
Ramnagar is a small town with one tiny two lane road acting as the backbone for logistics, shops, government offices etc. The traffic jam diarrhoea was still not over. Blocking this two lane road were a lot of trucks. After about an hour of waiting in a circular traffic jam, the trucks finally moved out and somehow made enough space for the Palio and the Endeavour to squeeze out. We moved on till we reached a barricade with a few cops around. They were stopping each and every vehicle and checking all documents and stuff inside the car. Fortunately they weren’t too nagging and got done with their routine in a jiffy. Later we found out that such a police checking is never done in this area, more on that later. We proceeded into what looked like a jungle safari – huge trees and vegetation on both the sides, lots of warning signs about animals, safety, speed limits etc. It was in fact a stretch of the highway that passes through the jungles. A lot of resorts have been set up against this highway stretch. Our Mahindra Club Resort was one such property. Since this Mahindra property, called ‘Nature Trails’, is a fairly new one, it still doesn’t exist on most mapping devices/softwares. But we knew we were close, thanks to all the hoardings around. A few kilometres later, we managed to find the gates for the resort. By the time we checked in, it was already evening time. The view behind our studio apartment was breathtaking. There was a blue river calmly flowing against the white pebbled shore. The sun was heading for the horizon and had painted the sky orange making the overall scene absolutely mind blowing! There were a couple of peacocks on the shore and moved around gracefully as if they guarded the entrance to the jungle. We had arrived to the right destination…
