Day 1 Delhi - Jaipur via Ramgarh

Here's what happens when parents excite each other with grand gifts such as brand new cars, they happily donate their old car to their younger thing, who is trying to make it in another city and finds cars unaffordable. But in their delirium of Joy from their red coloured acquisitions, they say things that they later aren't so sure about like, "Hey, why don't you and Dad go on a ROAD TRIP and drive the Old Car down to Mumbai!"

Now, I've got a lot of friends with their various out of state cars in Mumbai, and I found that most of them have had them trained in, trucked in, or generally driven in. A road trip with their parents, through the rough rugged and real India, full of Dakoo Gabbar Sings and other Bollywood stereo-types, was never on the cards.

But here's the thing! Turns out its not such a bad idea. Sure, its cheaper to send it along by other means of Transport, 5000 by rail, 7 grand for petrol and a driver and his return ticket. But parent-child road trip? Surely its worth the 4 nights in nice lodges (around 2,500 - 3,000 per night) and the tolls and the petrol) for that quality time?

And today, there are so many parents in Delhi, with so many kids in Mumbai and so many spare cars to gift to them (remember, you DO need to re-register, and that's 4.5% of Invoice value with depreciation for Octroi and 7 percent of Invoice value with depreciation for Registration), that I decided to test out whether this could be the ultimate father son bonding experience.

Now, there are too approaches to this. One is goal oriented. "We've got to get this car to Mumbai by day after tomorrow!" and knowing me and my dad's propensity to compulsively focus on such goals, I decided that I would be the voice that says 'Smell the roses' (or in this case the petrol pumps that dot NH8).

My dad is a very very fit senior citizen,
(Touch wood - oh no! Where? I'm in an 800! Quick Dad stop need to hug that tree!!
What? WHY?
YOU WON"T UNDERSTAND DAD... JUST STOP!!!)


but even I don't want to push 7-10 hour drives on him. So my plan was to do it slow, take it easy, stop at many places and places that he would like. He's not much of a sight-seer, but he does like creature comforts and nice places to stop and stay. So after a bit of research using the Maps of India, Lonely Planet and a less than Useful Road Holidays in India that the AA has published, I found that it would be really nice to stay in nice Home lodges and other heritage hotel spots and see the sights over nice cups of tea served by bearers with stuffed animals looking over you - one of them even holding a tray - which was a bit sad really).



So with NH8 as a general guideline, and knowing that my dad won't be happy with any detour over half an hour from NH8, I made my plan. Mom, whose idea it was in the first place, suddenly worried that we were heading into the great Indian rural unknown and suggested we carry all manner of chaku, bandhook, pistal, and a aluminum softball bat to protect us. So one Tili and Narayal later, and 4 squished nimbu's under the tyres, we headed off into the great - extremely well sign posted 4 lane unknown.

We left Delhi at 10. No hurry, yes we aimed to hit the road by 8.30 but I was printing out maps and hotel bookings - I've only planned the first 3 nights so far, yes there are two more (dad doesn't know!) - Dad was tying my brand new stereo system back into the dashboard - because the B4$!42#'s at Khan Market thought that the face plate was structurally sound enough to hold up the whole thing. And generally I wanted to be sure that Dad was up for this trip, so I didn't really zip up my bag stroller until he was chomping at the bit to get to Jaipur. Off we went, nerves were high, a mosquito kept buzzing around in the car from Haus Khas to Vasant Vihar which became the soul object of both our attentions (we had the most close calls in that first 5 km and none the rest of the day - which I see as a good start to get those out of the way). A simple open the window and let it out did the trick after our homicidal attempts all failed. Then came dad settling in, his baseball cap needed to find a home, and tried various places for the first 20 minutes. First the dashboard, then the space between the tape holder under the dashboard, in the glove compartment, on the corner of the glove compartment door, on lap, under the sun visor, finally it found that the back seat was as good a place as any and settled there. Dad took out his notebook, we filled petrol, he wrote down the mileage, liters filled (I asked him to throw in the time) and armed with the printed out maps I gave him, he navigated me onto NH8 (Which is to basically go out of our colony and turn right).

Then we both got worried about the possibility of the tyres blowing up (I hear that’s a major cause of accidents on the Mumbai-Pune expressway) So we stopped at 6 of the 300 petrol stations in Harayana to see if we could check the pressure of our warmed up tires. None of them had air, or a pressure gauge. We finally remembered at the Rajasthan border that we had packed one, and checked to see that all tyres hovered around 28 when warm, which they did, so all was good.

Then, the routine began to set in. Every bump in the landscape was referred to by Dad as the Aravallis, and any time either one of us wanted the other to stop back seat driving “Oh look at those lovely fields” became the phrase du-jour!. I started my camel count. 5 so far (disappointing), how we overtook, checking on the left of obstinate lorries that wouldn’t give way to see if we could pass them safely there, team work came into the game and we were all settling in: and just as Mom predicted, the stories started to flow. The whole point of the trip to have a fun time together realized within 2 hours of setting out from Delhi. This was SUCH A GOOD IDEA.

We stopped at an amazingly American-esque rest stop called King’s Highway Hotel (A Coffee Day! Yay) and then plunged into north western Rajasthan with great purpose. As we drove we had the Omlette Parathas and headed fast through the various way points on the map, and when all was good, I reminded Dad of my first detour to the Ramgarh Hunting Lodge. I wanted to have a nice Taj Tea with a great view of 267 sq miles of water. With some uncertainty as to how to get there, we went through a couple of B roads, villages and finally after asking many a local (no Gabbar Singh Types) arrived by crossing over a large Bund in a spur of what turned out to actually be the Arravali’s.


It was beautiful, gorgeous, and the lack of water while sad, didn’t take away from the worth while detour of NH8.


After many Parathas, Lassi, Dahi and a cup of not so great tea, we hit the road again, and took new directions (that didn’t backtrack) to NH8. I had hoped we’d stop in Amer (an amazing fort exists there, but for some reason the quite nicely maintained quiet country road connecting us back to NH8 bypassed the whole plan and popped us right into the North East corner of Jaipur. Where all the potholes, traffic, dust, and insane rubble that this city calls roads started. Without a clear idea of where we were going ( I knew we needed to be in the South East corner of the city) we started to make through rough roads to our first night stop. Barwara Kothi in the colonial part of Jaipur (Civil Lines, pretty colonial sounding at least). Frazzled and somewhat irritated by all the bouncing around that we suddenly had to experience ( I mean, we’d had a ride that was smooth as glass till then) We found Barwara Kothi not a moment to soon. This place is excellent. Its beautiful, feels like a nice place to be and is of much relief to weary travelers. The Gurkha and 3rd or fourth generation descendents of the Maharana of Barwara ( I think) are taking great care of us at their brand new quiet little boutique hotel in this beautiful colonial bungalow. Our twin bed cheapest room is more than we could expect for the rate we found online, and dad is now comfortably tucked in under his Razai in his 4 poster bed (not before we went to the Polo Lounge at the Taj Rambaugh Palace to have a beer tho!) and now, after day one is over I’m ready to call it a night as well.

Not sure what we’ll do tomorrow. Either check out Jaipur in the morning a bit, I’ve got to get sunglasses, and we may need to just have a quick check under the hood re: tuning the car (practical note – if you’re telling your mechanic to do a full total service of the car for a long distance run, wheel balance, alignment, engine tuning, spark plug change, headlight alignment, coolant, oil filters, tyre treads etc etc. Run the car on a highway at the speed you want to maintain during the journey for a complete test. Don’t do a city run test. Its just not the same. A lot of little stuff came up and while the car is in no mortal peril it could be running better. But, the plan? Jaipur for a bit maybe, Ajmer, and then we stop about 70 km outside Udaipur at what I hope will be the third nice little heritage bivouac… Kumbalgarh, here. Lets see! Thanks to my reliance connect card, you’ll get the pics and the posts as soon as I’m tucked into my next bed! G’night y’all.
See the pics here.