Gurgaon to Goa by Road with the intrepid Mulan

Sharmila has been promising Mulan, our English Cocker Spaniel, a visit to the beach since we moved back to Gurgaon from Penang. This road trip has also been on our bucket list for a while, and a promise to Mulan was excuse enough to make it happen.

So, we set off for Goa by road with Mulan and our daughter in early December. We left at 7 a.m. on a Sunday for Udaipur via the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway (NE-4). The highway connects the Sohna Elevated Corridor from Gurgaon to the Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Maharashtra, passing through Dausa, Kota, Ratlam, Vadodara, and Surat.

The highway is beautiful at this time of the year, with flowering bougainvillea in all hues and colours, interspersed with some Amaltas adding to the vibrancy. The wide 21-meter median on the highway is an interesting design innovation based on the principles of forgiving highways, with a depression where plants grow to reduce the impact in case a vehicle swerves off the road. I think, at night, the plants and bushes also help prevent headlights from oncoming vehicles from the opposite side from bothering you.

Just before Dausa, we got off NE-4 and took the Agra Road, which skirts around Jaipur and bypasses Ajmer, Bhilwara, and Nathdwara to reach Udaipur. In Udaipur, we stayed at the spectacular RAAS Devigarh. We had last stayed there 22 years ago when our daughter was a few months old, and the 40-room hotel was still as charming and beautiful. They really made Mulan feel welcome, and she was served her boiled chicken-vegetable-rice dish in their signature style, topped with edible flowers! Pets are welcome in most parts of the property, except the main restaurant. We spent a lovely evening in their bar, playing old vinyl records and sipping Mint Juleps.

Raas Devigarh

 

Mulan’s Meal at Raas, Devigarh! 

After a late breakfast, we left for Vadodara around 10 a.m. for a 6-hour drive to the Taj Vivanta. We crossed the border at Ratapur between Rajasthan and Gujarat. This stretch is spectacular, winding through the Aravalli range. At each bend, they have placed smashed-up cars on stone pillars — imagine a mini Stonehenge with cars on top — to remind people to drive slowly. Quite a stark and impactful message.

Taj Vivanta – Vadodra

The national highways through Rajasthan and the state highways are super smooth and built to last. Gujarat, however, is still a work in progress, and the existing highways are in a state of disrepair. The roads are patchy at best, dusty, and filled with smog, except for the Ahmedabad-Baroda highway, which is world-class. While all the toll plazas in Gujarat operate efficiently like the rest of the country, the plazas and the roads leading to them are in a terrible state. Not sure why.

Taj Vivanta, Vadodara, was also very welcoming to Mulan. They have a lift especially to take pets down to a garden patch (with an in-house Goose!) to relieve herself. Sharmila even partook in their anual Christmas cake mixing ceremony. They put non-alcoholic malt beverages in the dry-fruit mix! They made Mulan’s meal as per Sharmila’s specific instructions and had it ready for our onward journey the next morning, along with our packed breakfast.

Day 3 was going to be a really long 11.5-hour drive to Pune through Gujarat and Maharashtra. We left at 6:30 a.m. for our longest day on the road, and it wasn’t the prettiest. Sharmila and I took turns behind the wheel to give each other a break from the tiring drive. Throughout the trip, we stopped every 3–4 hours so Mulan and we could stretch our legs, and also for Mulan could relieve herself. A lot of roadwork is happening in Gujarat, and this section should be more efficient in a year or so, but the landscape promises to be bleak, industrial, and smog-filled. As a matter of fact, low-hanging smog was a constant feature in most towns along the highway. We were stopped by cops just once during the entire trip. A posse of cops hailed us over to check for alcohol and even went thru Sharmila’s hand bag to check for drugs! Being mistaken for a drug mule will be part of her CV now. We passed Thane, just outside Mumbai, and hit one of the few traffic jams on the entire journey before reaching the Bombay-Pune Expressway and heading to Taj Vivanta in Pune. Taj, Pune even gave a welcome cake (for human’s) for Mulan and she even got her own bed. I rewarded myself with a large Rum and Coke.

Pune

The fourth and final day’s drive was lovely in most parts. This section of the Pune-Bangalore highway is in the middle of a lot of work, and the last stretch before one enters Sawantwadi, north of Goa, is a spectacular drive through the ghats and forests. The only place we hit a traffic jam, besides Thane, was at Karad in Maharashtra, where a mega flyover is being constructed. It’s quite telling how far our infrastructure has evolved when we encountered traffic only for a few kilometres over the entire 2000 — kilometre trip to Goa, and even then, we were stuck in the jam for maybe 90–100 minutes in total on a 36-hour journey.

Pune to Goa 

While our 8-lane superhighways are made for the future, the same can’t be said for our trucks! All of them — be it Tatas, Eicher, or Leyland — are extremely slow and ply below the speed limit, even when not fully loaded. They hardly manage to crawl up flyovers and struggle on the ghats. This slows down traffic and, I’m sure, makes transport inefficient.

The toll-plazas were all efficient with minimal stoppage times and the ones in Maharashtra scanned the tag even before one drove up to the barricade. Maybe newer model scanners. In Gujarat at a couple of tolls where the reader was slow or not working, the operator held a ‘fishing-rod’ type pole to read the tag on the windscreen! Idiots celebrating India’s ‘jugaad’ would find this highly innovative! Tolls were around Rs.400-Rs.500 for each leg, so Rs.2000 for 2000 Kms. All thru the highway there are enough food, fuel and loo’s available. Lots of McDonalds, KFCs and local chains. We had freshly fried and very tasty Vada-Paos at a Kamath’s a few hours outside Pune.

These new national and state highways will result in people taking more driving holidays and there will be a huge opportunity for travel companies helping plan these, highway side motels so one does not need to get into city congestion, trailer rentals etc over time.

We finally made it to Goa from Pune in 9.5 hours with a few breaks en route. Mulan was a real trooper throughout the trip, and after a day in Goa, she sat outside the car, expecting to be driven away to the next destination.

Goa