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Published: June 17th 2007
Vehicle New Ford Ikon - The Josh Machine
Route Hyderabad(62km)->Sangareddi(225)->Sholapur(246)->Pune mostly on NH9
Prologue It all started me visiting my friend Ashwani for dinner at Hi-tech City part of Hyderabad on Friday night. After an uneventful dinner we decided go for some drinks at his colleagues place close to Hussein Sagar Lake. Ashwani picked up a fight with the watchman of their apartment regarding the late visit issue. His buddy and local resident, Sunil intercepted at an important moment though when the things were pretty heated up and looked nasty. To lift up the mood we had a long chit-chat and drinking session till 2:00 am in the night and decided to go for a ride with his new “Ford Ikon” car.
The Trigger Virtually, wearing the sleeping dresses we, including Sunil roomies and buddies Bhupi and Rishab, headed for Panjagutta Junction to have some tea from late night roadside hawker. It was 2:30 in the night and we decided why not go for a long drive on highway. We hit the road through Bowenpalli to Medchal which was suppose to lead to Mumbai highway. Instead after driving for an hour on the deserted highway we found
an equally deserted roadside Dhaba where the attendant told us we were actually heading for Nagpur and we were not Hyderabad - Pune highway. After another small tea session we took a sharp right turn on the next crossing to head for Pune.
The Journey Begins Sunil uttered ,” Maa Kasam! Aab to subhe ka chai hum Pune maen hee piyenge!” (which translates approximately,” we are going to Pune to drink tea”) Luckily the car is pretty good shape as we drove briskly at steady pace of 110km/hr in the middle of night with some Bollywood dance numbers.
Karnataka It was early morning we crossed the Andhra Pradesh border and reached Bidar district of Karnataka state. Bidar has a nice old Balki Fort but we were not in much mood to wait for visiting fort early morning and drove on. We found the road to Sholapur, a small town in Eastern Maharashtra. The highway was pretty dry and there were absolutely no roadside Dhabas (highway restaurants). After some time we found Reliance A1 Plaza and halted for breakfast, air and refuel of car tank. As we were having Idli and Dosa we noticed one dirty Israeli couple just
landed there. They came on a old dirty Enfield bike. They got everything packed up in their bike including a dog, a drum to empty beer bottle. The guy spoke in broken English with heavy Arabic accent as the lady went enquiring for . They started from Bangalore going towards Madhya Pradesh and then all the way to Varanasi , The Holy city of India. The rail started drizzling down at a irritating pace. The sky looked dull and grey but somehow I feel never really look like it will pour heavily.
Maharashtra After Crossing Sholapur we halted for lunch at a some decent looking restaurant. Anyways we were in for a shock! The restaurant is deserted and the attendant explained us that “Paneer Butter Massala” is actually a sweet dish!!! Anyways the food was not good at all and he actually made “Paneer Butter Massala” taste like a dessert! We passed by the lengthy sugarcanes fields and passed by some unknown river dams in otherwise drought regions of Eastern Maharashtra. At Maharashtra every boards and signposts were written to Hindi which I am able to read other than Telugu or Kannada language boards which I could not
decipher. So it was easier for us to get the direction for travel. One thing about the Marathis is found interesting is that most of the male we saw wore white Nehru Caps and white shirts. I was not clear whether it was a tradition or not! We halted about 100 km before Pune to have tea again. The tea was so sweet that we felt that it was more of a hot sugarcane juice and not tea. We joked over that since there was so much production of sugarcane at Maharashtra that they actually ended up putting a lot of them in tea!
Pune Arrival We reached Pune when sun almost set. Pune looked more of modern Indian city. Nice cool weather, lots of restaurants and joints and hangouts. The streets were narrow though but very organized capsule bus stops and bus lanes which was pretty cool. We crossed Swargate and headed for Kothrud. Sunil got confused at one road and went the wrong way on a one way road and ended up giving fine to Traffic Police. We put up at one of Sunil’s local friend, Abhishek’s place at Kothrud who works for a local Software Firm.
He is a very special guy with a talent of making extraordinary paper arts. All his room was full of his amazing artistic works. After a brief introduction to all the guys out there we headed for dinner at Garden Court Restaurant. It was a pretty nice restaurant located on hill and you can get a great view of the city. The food and drinks served was awesome. The restaurant has a nice swimming pool but no one is allowed to swim in there! Ha ha!
Mumbai-Pune Express Way Next day, early morning we woke up early around 7:00 pm. Abhishek and one of his Gujarati friend will be joining with our existing gang to go to Lonawala. We found replacement clothes from Abhishek who seemed to have all replacement clothes for all with all sizes. Luckily Abhishek got the permission from his parents to drive the car and soon both the car hit the road to head for the destination. We halted for a traditional Marathi style breakfast of “Bada Paon”(Kind of Stuffed Fried Potatoes Sandwich) at Joshi Bada Paon . We resumed our journey and rain started again. We soon reached the Toll Bridge for the Mumbai-Pune
Express highway. This highway is regarded the best Highway in India known for beautiful scenery and high speed lanes and tunnels. The roads were pretty well maintained. With the English weather and the roads reminded me traveling on some country road at UK. Driving through the highway well over 120 km/hr with the exotic view of the distant clouded hills, waterfalls and electronic tunnels was an amazing experience. We took a right turn for Lonawala and headed for hills.
Lonawala Luckily rain has stopped and the place was foggy and as we went up the woods and winding hill roads it seemed we were driving the clouds. In fact, it was so cloudy that we almost missed the view of a narrow river generated from the waterfall from the hills. It was pretty strange that the place is has become a major tourist destination in spite of the rain at Mumbai which killed 40 plus people. We even found some couple at top of hill under waterfall and enjoying the bathing. Almost every corner of the road you will be find a heavy motor land cruisers and young crowd drinking, dancing in the rain to the groovy Bollywood item
numbers. There were lot of shops selling roasted corn and “chikis”( dry jaggery sweetened peanuts ) . Actually we all confused as every corner of the street there we found big shops by name “Maganlal Chiki” selling chikis. We drove till Amby Valley resorts. On the way back we trekked a bit down till the rain pouring very heavily and we decided to descend down the valley. We halted at Dheeraj Kumar restaurant for lunch and ordered Biryani and some beer. The Biryani was disappointing to us mainly because we hail from Hyderabad, where you get the best Biryani in entire India. But Pune looked more lively because of the youth crowd and better looking North Indians.
Khandala Post lunch we headed for Khandala. As we reached Khandala it was still raining heavily and we waited patiently but rain did not stop so we headed back to Pune city. We luckily found a narrow divider lane for way back Pune but Sunil missed the turn and their car headed for Mumbai instead of Pune. They however later told us they found a place to turn at around 100 km before the flooded Mumbai.
Exploring Pune On returning we
decided to go for some window shopping around Pyramid, Camp Pune. Then we went down to Fergusson Road know for fashion trendy students of Fergusson College. We had some Aloo Paratha at Chaitanya Restaurant there. One Aloo Paratha was so big that we could not dare ordering for one more round of it. Then we drove round the famous and posh roads of Koregao park. The place had nice youth and posh westernized crowd and full of expensive restaurants. We thought of visiting “Fire N Ice” nightclub but it was already very late so we decided to drop the plan and headed back.
The Return Early morning next day we started our uneventful journey back to Hyderabad. On our return journey we again stopped at another Reliance A1 plaza for an inexpensive and sumptuous lunch and again we did not manage to spot any good eating places on way back. Oh! I forgot to mention the great Indian colorful cows we spotted on highway. Actually I still remember cows painted in black, white, pink and even yellow with stripes! The Highway roads of Pune were in a pretty bad shape though as we reached Andhra Pradesh the roads looked
a lot smoother and better. The return mood was however spoiled by a even poor roads on outskirts of Hyderabad where three lane highway work was going on and we could not help drive to dirty pebbly earthen road amidst a thick layer of dust all around for almost an hour!
After Thoughts There was zero planning behind the trip. But if we had planned we would not have ended up doing something outrageous like this. I simply wished I had taken my camera that day so that I could have taken more photos for the trip. The mobile phone was out of charge on the second day of the journey. I had my contact lenses on for almost 17 hours and did not have any glasses and did not get the time to buy lens solution or spare lens. And the car with all the dirt deposited outside looked like more of a rally car and the complete shiny black color is replaced by brown grey dirt color. It was quiet a remarkable thing when one small thing leads to another. What started as a small drive on highway after drink ended up as big as almost reaching
Mumbai and visit to Khandala!
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Jyothi
non-member comment
Hi Arnab this is the second blog of urs i am reading it was nice but not that much of ur kerala trip the days u spent in munnar n the accident of gurinder was really horrible. But i enjoyed u having dinner at hitech city which is the nearer place to my house (i stay at madhapur) n abt punjagutta i knw pretty well coz i work in the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat, which is near lumbini park (i like to read abt the places . When i was browsing for the temples in the border of Kerala n tamilnadu i found ur blog. i really enjoy reading ur travel blogs.