Hyderabad to Shirdi and back (2006)

As I am not so confident with my driving I had called Imtiyaz Bhai my friend on Saturday to help me drive up to the RTO for registering my Car. The thing at the RTO office took just 30 seconds and thus we decide to go for a long drive.


We thought we could go up to Zahirabad which is a distance of 100 kms and test the Cars AC n its cooling in 46 degrees outside temperature Imtiyaz always knew that I wanted to go to Shirdi with my car and thus half way down to Zahirabad suggested that we try and attempt Shirdi. According to both of us Shirdi should not have been more than 300 kms from Hyderabad. So we decided to give it a shot.


And what a shot it was. In a single pair of clothes, with less than Rs.2000 in the pocket, no charger for our mobiles we decided to test the baby with only courage to fall back upon.


It is only on the highway you realize how useless your credit card company's most accepted promise is. No we dont take Visa, Sorry Master Card not accepted and this ATM is out of order made us feel we would be pushing our luck soon. But as they say HE has got the whole World in His hands. A Reliance Petrol pump in the middle of nowhere accepted my master card..


The moment we crossed Zahirabad we realized we had to drive more than what we had bargained for as Sholapur was more than 200 kms from there. We had set out at 2.00 in the afternoon and planned to reach Sholapur by six but reached there only at about 8 in the evening. We decided to have dinner and thus reach Shirdi by 10 but there again we realized that a Wagon R will not be able to cover 300 kms in 2 hours.. Yes Shirdi is 300 kms from Sholapur.


Imtiyaz is an expert driver and has driven in many parts of the world he loves driving and so we decided that there was no point turning back.The Road form Hyderabad to Sholapur is a good National Highway with disciplined traffic as this road further goes on to connect to first Pune and then Bombay. The road beyond Sholapur is also good till a place called Timburli but from then on to Amhednagar it is a good road but with only trucks plying on it so the discipline goes for a toss and overtaking any vehicle is like trying to elope with the truck drivers daughter.


I always thought that Nagar (Amhednagar is called Nagar by Maharashtrians) was only 20 kms from Shirdi I realized I was wrong It was 83 kms. We some how managed to reach Shirdi at 3 am on Sunday.. A weekend implied that there was no vacancy at most places but some how we found a room to rest. As we were to visit a temple we had to have a bath and so we had to get up at 5 and freshen up. The darshan line was long enough to ensure we stood from 7 to 8. After that both of us went to a road side stall and hogged as if we had accompanied Moses through his 40 day desert march.


Imtiyaz always wanted to visit the Ajanta & Ellora caves near Aurangabad and I was in no mood to go back straight home. We again decided to go. Moreover I am a fan of the architecture of the Daulatabad fort which is very much on the way. Aurangabad is around 100 kms from Shirdi and this time I was not wrong. There are two new routes that one can chose from and we decided on the one which is a by pass 4 lanes a side National Highway. This by pass originates a few kms before Kopergaon and the very sight of the opening toll plaza was making us salivate for speed. On the highway we drove the fastest we could with hardly any traffic on either side. We never realized why there was no traffic and no toll collected from us until around 25 kms from Kopergaon we came across a bridge which was yet to be completed. In fact this highway it self was yet to be completed.


I had seen Speed the movie and was in no mood to let my passion yellow baby do any thing like what they did with the bus in the film so we decided to try something else. A passer by cyclist informed us that the next 40 kms (up to Lasur) there was no pakka road. So it was a little detour from under the bridge over a creaking set of wooden planks and on to the mud track it was for the next 40 kms. My baby was being tested for more than what I had bargained for. A cribbing Imtiyaz kept scaring me by telling me that the gears were having problems and a puncture was inevitable, but the zooming Sumos and jeeps made me feel a little reassured. I always knew that Maharashtra had the best Road Transport bus network in the world. But today I realized how true to the fact and their slogan Where there is a Road there will be an ST is. In the wilderness of interior Maharashtra we met a few ST buses blazing a mud trail like a comet. The sight was amazing and I really missed my camera.


After driving at 20 to 30 ka speed for around an hour and a half we reached Lasur. This slow driving on the 2nd and 3rd gear ensured that we were low on petrol. At Lasur to our surprise we got a petrol pump and here we met the highway again. Imtiyaz pushed the paddle to the limit and my car also responded as if it was enjoying it and with in less than 40 min we were near Aurangabad. At Aurangabad we first came across the Daulatabad fort. Did you know that this fort has never been conquered by any army in aggression and that this was the capital of India for 10 odd years when Muhammad Bin Tughlaq felt insecure about Delhi?


As we had no plans to go up the fort we decided to move on. Next we visited the grave of Aurangzeb. I have always had this fascination about the way the guys around his grave tell you the story of this Mughal emperor. Having studied in Bombay all my life I was always told by my history teacher that this guy was the worst among all the Mughal rulers. The story that the guys around his grave tell you is an all together different one. They define him as a very simple man who knew that he was left with very little money thanks to his father building the Taj Mahal. His grave is very simple and does not look like an Emperors grave.


From there we moved up the hills and landed up at Ellora. It was here that I realized that my colorful friend Imtiyaz was a pervert who thought that the carvings at Ellora had sexually explicit depictions. When I told him that neither Ellora nor Ajanta had any thing like that but were very beautiful any which way, he lost interest and I had to almost drag him to see the caves..Soon I realized it was no use trying to flog a dead horse moreover Ajanta is 110 kms away from Ellora so I decided to return to Aurangabad and from there Hyderabad.


Aurangabad is a place where Shiv (my colleague) was born and brought up so I decided to give him a call and ask him the best route to take while returning. He Suggested Jalna Nanded Nizamabad. This is the same route that the Indian Army had taken to annex the Nizams state of Hyderabad after Sardar Patel decided enough was enough. So we set out after sipping a cup of tea.


Once before in my life around 14 years ago when I was doing a summer job in college I had visited both Jalna and Nanded and have faint memories of the place. Jalna was a busy junction then as the broad gauge railway line terminated there and from then on till Nanded was a meter gauge line. I remember distinctly that my journey from Nanded to Jalna was an overnight one and today I realized that the distance between the two places was just around 100 kms. We had estimated dinner time would have been in Nanded. So just before we reached we stopped at a dhaba to eat. The experience was different and to be honest I did not enjoy sitting on a char pai n trying to balance food on a wooden plank.


When we reached Nanded we felt it had been raided by the US army. It looked like a town in Afghanistan. Roads in bad shape, buildings crumbling, people non-cooperative, etc Dont know why but that did leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Nanded is also a Sikh pilgrim place and they say the most number of Sardars you will find out side of the Punjab will be here. We felt a little sorry for the people there due to the bad roads but moved on.


This point forward we were confronted with a strange problem. No milestones or sign boards. We had been diving for more than 24 hours now with only 2 hours of sleep n that was telling on us. Imtiyaz was not able to drive faster than 50 ka speed and I felt we needed a break. Somehow Imtiyaz would not give up. In the hundreds of argument and conversations we were having we missed a important turn and landed up on a forest area road that promised to reach Hyderabad via Sri Ranga Reddy district of Andhra Pradesh. When we asked a Truck wala, he told us that though this was a short cut the road is through the jungle so we should drive carefully. This scared the shit out of me at least. Imtiyaz was not looking deterred at all. There was nobody on this road for miles together. Small Adivasi villages just came up from almost nowhere and then disappeared in to oblivion. We stopped at one such village as we had run out of water. Seeing a car stop in a village that had no electricity at 1.00 am made a crowd of men folk gather around us. Though they were looking hostile, when we asked for water they did help us out.


We went on driving till we could drive no more. We stopped 80 kms from Hyderabad near what looked like a Electricity Traction Sub station at 4.00 am. The Wagon R is a beautiful camping car. It flattens itself out to an extent that is a bed for two. I was proud to show off this feature to my friend and we went off to sleep for 2 hours. At Six when the Sun came up we realized that we had parked our car on the banks of a beautiful lake formed by a dam that was used to supply electricity. The birds made a lot of noise and the entire scenario was real beautiful.


Six onwards we decided to drive home. The road we were cursing was very beautiful. We had dense forest on both sides and nothing following us or coming from the opposite side. For the first time we could actually listen to the usually silent engine sing. The sight of the rising sun was almost from a movie. I realized the 1300 odd kms we had done was nothing less than a movie. Imtiyaz however kept whining about the fact that there were no erotic scriptures in Ellora. If only he had asked me..


I was so tired from the trip that I decided to take an off on Monday and used the day to keep in my car now a travel kit that will help me combat such impulsive travel urges of mine.