You are not going to drive overland to Peking in THAT car are you? One only has to think of the damage done to OUR cars on the RR Australia rally.
That was the sentiment of an RREC club member when we first set off in 1990 to drive overland from London to Peking to Hong Kong; three months of motoring anxiety and bliss. In the intervening 26 years our Bentley Continental and Lanchester 40hp have reached destinations as far east as Peking, as far south as Cape Town as far west as Ecuador and as far north as Moscow but it is to India that we are repeatedly drawn.
In October 2016 we arrived at our favourite hotel The Taj Mahal Palace Mumbai and 2 days later I was at the container base of the Nhavasheva docks with our trusty shipping agents Kainaaz. They came prepared with a low loader as our daughter Victoria and her family had also shipped their Lagonda to join us for the first month of our motoring journey, the children were still at school so I would clear the cars in readiness for their arrival 5 days later. It was the 5th October and the monsoon was still running and the relatively short journey of 90km around the bay is always a difficult drive and this time made worse as the monsoon had broken the road surfaces badly and port formalities had delayed the release of the cars until darkness had fallen, but worse the Lagonda would have to be removed from the transporter and driven by me to enter the customs zone of Mumbai and this transaction would take place on an unlit congested road in horizontal rain sweeping in from the bay: a task made very difficult for me by the central accelerator pedal arrangement of the Lagonda!
Our month with the Hallett’s October 2016
Our two cars Lanchester and Lagonda set out from the Taj Palace for our first nights stop at Pune thereby crossing the North Western Ghats, a tortuous road of notorious legend.
It is always our policy when driving in India to set off just after dawn which in winter time is cold, though the heat soon rolls on after 10 o’clock and becomes fairly unbearable in an open car after 11.30, if one is stuck in city gridlock traffic. It is therefore our aim always to get out of the cities, big or small before the inevitable gridlock of all Indian cities and therefore we arrived in Pune, actually the Hinjawadi Taj hotel in time for coffee! Much is made of the chaotic driving in India and it is chaotic but for the most part they do all seem to know what they are doing though hardly a day went by during our three months of driving when we didn’t come up against a wreckage of a very recent accident of buses, lorries or small cars.
The Western Ghats are not high but the roads are serpentine and in parts steep with 3 lanes in each direction for the most part though the fast lane is a misnomer as this will almost always be blocked by a “faster” moving lorry making 25mph and overtaking other lorries which maybe doing between 5 and 10mph due to their being criminally overloaded: in fact our experience has shown us that most road vehicles from the lightweight 125cc motorcycle carrying 6 people to the 40 ton lorry carrying 60 tonnes of marble, are heavily over loaded.
The following morning we set off south on the Golden Quadrilateral Highway turning off for Bhor for an overnight stop at the Riverview Hotel Chiplun. If we have ever found a beautiful and bucolic road in India this must be it. It actually carries the sobriquet of Super Highway (SH) and for 45miles it is a narrow single track pot holed and badly maintained road, it does though offer some of the most wonderful driving in India!
This type of road, which is the main purpose of our motoring, is vintage and it winds its way up hill and through villages, some tiny enough to rightly be called hamlets, through forests and farms: its surface brings out vintage anxieties for ones tyres, springs, wheel bearings and shock absorbers and demands a slow speed and a fairly high level of concentration to avoid the pot holes and ditches, but it is, for its 100 miles westerly journey a real pioneering beautiful road. The British built a dam, the Bhatghar and the resulting reservoir, a veritable lake, looks so natural as the road winds along its length that it could be a lake. At one stop, waiting for the Lagonda, a young man arrived to inspect our Fortyhorse and in mutual admiration I inspected his new Royal Enfield 350 bullet which he offered for me to ride. What a lovely experience that turned out to be as that bike is light enough and powerful enough to have agility on the country roads of India: the owner announced himself as the youngest police chief in the whole of India and what a smart young man he was.
Meanwhile the Lagonda, 4 up and luggage, was finding the road very harsh on the chassis with its limited ground clearance but Chris managed the road without any mishap and we were all pleased to have a glass of beer at the Riverview Hotel Chiplun.
With less than 80 miles to our next hotel on the Arabian Sea coast we had a leisurely start of 07.30 but half an hour was lost in preparing the bill and then SH17 south turned into a nightmare drive for its road surface which could not have been resurfaced since it was the main Bombay-Goa highway, now replaced by that Golden Quadrilateral Highway. The short journey we had envisaged brought us into our hotel The Blue Ocean, just before 3 o clock in the afternoon. But on arrival at their gates the security wanted to know what our business was even though we had paid for reservations! They refused to open the stout iron gates. A little altercation put that to rights and we were given the choice of any two cottages in the lush jungle setting within the sound of the breakers of the Arabian Sea: a cool beer, a splash in the swimming pool with the children and all was well in paradise; we were the only guests!
3 nights at Blue Ocean gave the children a great opportunity to paddle in the sea with the tide out, rock pools with stranded lion fish and millions of fry, crabs and a stranded lobster kept them busy all day in the balmy, moist air currents. They would have been happy for a couple of weeks but we were moving down to Goa on that dreadful SH17. Fortunately it was good in parts and we had a timely arrival into Goa and immediately got lost as our Garmin Maps India really is an embarrassment to that company’s products.
Ahylia by The Sea, this was an exceptionally well run and well appointed boutique hotel right on the edge of the estuary and 100 yds down from a fishing colony. Essentially it is 3 Portuguese colonial style mansions run as a hotel with good cooking and fascinating views over the bay watching the fishermen plying their trade as the tide came in. The only difference is that most of their fishing boats have an outboard motor otherwise one could be transported back 100 years.
Our objective was to head east to Hyderabad through Hubli and Hampi. Once more over the Ghats again which are pretty severe here and heavily forested we dropped down into Hubli. We could hardly recognise the city since our last visit only a year ago as it was having a make-over, one of 200 cities in India to be brought into the modern world and be designated Smart City. Of course we got lost looking for the Gateway Hotel until a kindly gentleman stepped out of his chauffeured car and beckoned us to follow him. We would certainly be leaving very early the next morning.
With an approximate 100 miles to Hampi we could drive leisurely across the great Vijayanagr Plateau which involved 2 morning coffee stops, when we had our packed breakfast supplied by the Gateway. We now understood the Indian word “Jugaard” when a brand new and shiny red tractor stopped to inspect our vintage cars. This machine style was unique as the owner had bought the complete tractor minus its wheels. Apparently those giant heavily spudded wheels one is familiar with on tractors worldwide are as expensive as the complete tractor without its wheels, so the owner set about making his own with the help of the village blacksmith. These skinny large diameter wheels damaged the soil less and make the tractor much more economical according to its farmer owner and can never be prey to punctures; Jugaard!
Our hotel Hampis Boulders a discrete set of lodges on the Tungabhadra River is home to all exotic Indian species of wildlife except tiger which meant the girls were told of the perils of clambering down from their accomodation, Star Lodge to the river’s edge where healthy and large crocodiles can be seen sunning themselves half submerged and looking like so many other half submerged boulders in the river. Bobbie, the owner with a strong passion for wildlife, has transformed this stretch of the river by allowing tree, bush and water reeds to grow naturally. When asked after the holidays, “Which was the most memorable stay?” both girls, Francesca and Hermione, responded immediately “Hampis Boulders” where they went on a leopard safari and put up with the marauding languor monkeys which seemed to want to join them at each meal time.
Falaknuma Hyderabad, built as a residence by the equivalent of the Nizams chancellor and then reluctantly presented to the Nizam! This fabulous palace, now a Taj hotel, is probably one of the most wonderful hotels not only in India but in Asia and it was to this hotel that we were headed when we left our beloved Hampis Boulders in the pre dawn for the 250 miles north bound journey. As ever, we did want to get as much mileage done before our entrance into that fabled city, most of which would be cutting across country, before picking up the first class AH43, which is as good as any top class road in Europe.
With our cruising speed of 40mph and our stops to refuel, picnic, photograph etc., we never-the- less arrived just before the rush hour, and following our Garmin GPS we became immediately lost. Now we learned the back streets of Hyderabad and had our first motoring mishap when the Lagonda was hit by a motorcycle carrying a pillion. The damage was not great and nobody was hurt but what could have been an ugly incident was ameliorated by a passing scooterist and his pillion who sorted everything calmly for us and delivered us to the gates of Falaknuma.
Falaknuma Palace which takes its Urdu name from “mirror in the sky” was built on a prominence outside Hyderabad city where every kind of wild animal lived within its grounds including leopard but alas the city has caught up and encroaches its lower reaches though one still gets a feeling of the 1890’s as soon as one passes through its many gates. Securely parked, our weary crew were taken by horse drawn royal carriage up to the palace proper. There is so much one could write about this magnificent residence, and now hotel, and more one could write of the splendours of Hyderabad city with that second most architectural structure the Charminar (four gateways) pipped only by the Taj Mahal Agra as a symbol of India.
Hyderabadi food is the quintessential Indian cuisine and in our long experience of Indian cooking only Lucknow can think of rivalling its position: we dined well for our three nights stay and the girls played in the jungle swimming pool overhung with giant trees giving a cool setting into which one might expect Mowgli to appear and join in the frolicking with our two girls.
On a rather cold morning and in the dark of 6 a.m. we were loaded and ready to go following the hotel car which would put us safely on a new orbital road heading west by north with our next destination of Solapur. And good that road really was for about 50 miles, so good that when we turned off on the NH65 we thought we must have taken the wrong turning but no this was to be our journey for 220 miles and nerve racking it was. Sections of this road are being repaired piecemeal and idiosyncratically these would have a stretch of say 3 miles followed by an indescribable surface for say 30 miles afterwhich the piecemeal resurfacing would repeat: we thought this journey might never end and certainly this was our worst road during our 3 months of driving this year in India. One can hardly believe that a main road from Hyderabad to Mumbai or in fact from Chennai (Madras) could be so neglected: Mr. Modi is doing wonders for India’s infrastructure which has been neglected but India is such a massive country it looks like an impossible task even for him.
A new hotel in Solapur the Balaji Sarovar Premier could not have been a more welcome sight as we were all thoroughly exhausted from our 255 miles journey. We had stopped several times but wished we had spent more time at the massive ancient fort of Naldurg. Restoration is taking place and though we stopped for a brief photograph we were nervous because of the road surface and so rushed on.
It is having some care and as it was so massive and the road was so bad we hurried on after that brief stop. There was no respite the next morning as we set off again in the darkness of an early dawn on the NH65 westbound towards Kurkumbh, there we would turn north to Ahmednagar whose hotel shall remain nameless on account of the used toilet paper spotted by our girls floating in the swimming pool on the 3rd floor!
It was not an early start forced upon us by a long and difficult journey ahead the next day to Aurangabad, as that was a journey of only 72 miles, But our current hotel seemed like a good place to leave from. We were all looking forward to Aurangabad with its lovely Taj Vivanta Hotel, its city of 52 ancient gates and its magnificent Daulatabad castle, once described by the British Indian Army as impregnable.
Chris performed a service on the lovely Lagonda as I would do on Fortyhorse the following day, meanwhile we played with the girls swimming and croquet on the lawn while Vicky and Chris went out to explore the Gates and the Hallett family generally relaxed before setting out the following day to explore that Daulatabad fort which is one of the biggest fortifications in India and has one of the oldest and largest mosques.
Our three nights at Aurangabad soon came to an end and we decided to drive direct to Hinjawadi on the outskirts of Pune stopping for photographs, morning coffee and afternoon tea. As our wheels headed south we were all becoming aware that this part of our journey was coming to an end, that the Lagonda would stop at Nhavasheva docks for return shipment to Felixstowe England. Meanwhile we Susie, Vicky and the girls headed down to where we had started our journey a month ago The Taj Palace Mumbai.
Both vintage cars had done extremely well with very little maintenance and had put up with some of the most terrible road surfaces, some gridlock traffic jams and some horrendous heat in those city gridlocks; our lovely granddaughters Francesca and Hermione had loved almost every hotel, fallen in love again with India (they had been before 3 years previously) and Vicky and Chris said they had had a holiday of a lifetime.
They would soon be flying home, back to work for Chris, back to school for the girls and the Lagonda locked in a container for 6 weeks of splendid isolation, a well earned rest: while Susie and I set about planning “our journey” which would take us north to Delhi west to Jaisalmer and back again to Bombay to fly home on Christmas day.