Goa: Conquering the Ghats

I woke up to the splatter of a wheel cap zipping across the road like a flying saucer. By the time we could go and collect it, the vehicles behind us had made a mincemeat out of it. We continued our journey towards mangalore with colli now behind the wheel. When colli has the steering wheel, anything that is on less than four wheels is to be overlooked, trampled and forgotten. We fortunately did not have any victims that day.

Another colli surviver

Karnataka must be commended for it's undying love for it's native language. Every hoarding, every signboard, every milestone had nothing but Jelabis spewed on them. No English. It took us some intelligent guesswork to convince ourselves that we were on the right direction until we say a signboard that read in english, 'Road under construction. Take diversion'.

The diversion took us into the mountainous ghats and it was not until half an hour into the diversion that we realised that not a single vehicle from the other side had crossed us. It took us a while to realise that we were lost in the wilderness.

I always imagined estate owners in India to be old, pot-bellied, dhoti-clad and driving a mahindra jeep. Welcome to the new India. These guys were denim-clad, wore hats and sunglasses, and drove SUVs at 80 kmph in the winding ghats. It was quite a thrill to be tailing these guys as they offered to show us the real way to mangalore and it was such a disappointment to see ourselves driving into the 'Take Diversion' sign road.

Breakneck speed!

Lesson: When in karnataka, if a roadsign requests you to take diversion, drive through it.

The next four hours (we covered 30 kms) must be rated as my slowest driving experince ever. The car wouldn't go beyond the second gear as we say everything except the road. -potholes and boulders and even bigger boulders. There was a point when I thought we should turn back, but to get back to a real road we will have to go through the entire stretch again. We decided to keep all our eyes on the road and hope for smaller boulders.

By the time we managed to cross the ghats, both our front power windows had come crashing down and it was another pitstop at a roadside garage before we ambled into mangalore.

Pitstop 2: Ghat effect

Public interest message: While on the ghats, we saw a couple of guys lighting a cigarette and throwing the matchstick on the grass below. It immediately caught fire and all their efforts to stop it from spreading didn't help. All they could do was run away from that place. So if you guys are smokers, use a lighter and not a matchstick.

Route: Bangalore-Hasan-Seklashpur-Mangalore

Distance: ~ 320 kms