Old friends, fond memories and great going in the second leg
Coincidences can be cruel. But at times, they also come as a blessing in disguise. I was driving the One Lap Of India car, towards the end of the second leg from Delhi to Lucknow, and it so happened that I was alone in the car. The fast Delhi-Agra road was deserted, and the dense February fog was flirting with it, making the Scorpio's bright Hellas feel rather impotent.
I was running a steady 80 kph when the Delhi FM radio signal started to go weak. The digital display was now jumping up and down and interrupting my music. Suddenly I was not alone in the car. I could almost see Deepak Tolani, our late lensman, fiddling with the controls of the music system.
He was a compulsive fiddler and could spend a day tuning a car stereo and still be unsatisfied. If not for a cruel road accident he would have been with me. Deepak never let me go long distances alone and together we had driven thousands of kilometres. Thousands of happy kilometres.
But for now, I was enjoying his company again. In any case, The One Lap Of India, One Lap for Safety was a tribute to my dearest friend. Some three months back when Indian motoring journalists decided to get together for the first time to honour him, I never thought it would grow into a record-breaking run over 29 states in 29 days.
There he was cheering me up, egging me on...to cover more distances than ever before. I have kept count of the occasions that I have cried as an adult. And there were tears, along with the long tentacles of dense fog blurring my vision now.
The second leg of the mammoth event had started from Jammu. I met up with my driving partner and long time friend Murad Ali Baig on Feb 2 at the Delhi airport to board an Airbus A320 that would take us to the cell phone-free world of Jammu. There was army green everywhere and light machine guns stood guard in place of a lathi that would suffice in any other part of the country.
My Motoring colleagues Shumi, Param and Sameer drove in to Jammu the day after I arrived and immediately got the One Lap cars thoroughly serviced. We had a safety-speech-cum-press conference that afternoon combined with a formal flag-off by the minister of food and supplies of J&K. But the real driving would begin only next morning, and I was getting really impatient to do just that.
February 4 (Day One)
At eight in the morning as we drove off, Murad and I were accompanied by the support crew in the second Scorpio headed by N S Bal and Kailash Jat of Mahindra R&D. And an hour from Jammu, we were hopelessly lost.
While we waited for the support crew to catch up at Pathankot, they had taken the Pathankot bye-pass and were well on their way to Mandi. After losing an hour we met again and from then on, decided that the support car would stay in the rear-view of our car at all times.
Our first destination was Dharamsala, where we would seek the blessings of the Dalai Lama before carrying on with our journey. Throughout the 207 km drive to Dharamsala, we had the magnificent Dhauladhar range to our left. I have driven on roads lined by great oceans and at times, by hills, but to have the Himalayas for company as you blast through the valley is a magnificent feeling.
The Lama was on a month long retreat, but his receptionist, Tenzin Wayden, let us drive the Scorpio twins all the way up to the palace in Dharamsala and even scribbled a good luck message in Tibetan on the lead car.
The road to Shimla was pretty good and traffic sparse. The all-Indian SUV is a tad nervous on the mountains, but once you get used to the idea of attacking corners with a near two-tonne vehicle, it becomes fun. The going was brisk till we hit a traffic-blocking landslide, 262 km into the day.
The option was to wait until bulldozers arrived at the scene or to take a detour into unknown, unmapped territory and see if we could somehow reach Mandi instead of Shimla, our proposed night halt. We took option two and before we knew it, we were quite lost.
Thanks to some help from locals, we eventually emerged a few km on the better side of the landslide. It had taken all of three hours and it was getting really cold. Luckily the road to Mandi was fast yet winding. We made good progress, reached Mandi just in time to catch some dinner.
February 5 (Day Two)
Mandi is a cold transit town where tourists stop by for nothing more than a chai while on their way to more exotic places that lie ahead. The Scorpios, with all six lights blazing, were a great sight at the old suspension bridge at Mandi and once the mandatory pic was taken, we were off to Shimla.
The Bilaspur-Shimla state highway was well maintained, but had unpredictable corners. Some corkscrewed on us, while others let us carry decent speeds through. After a quick stop at a plastic-free Shimla for a welcome from the local Mahindra dealer who greeted us with slightly sad flowers (they were expecting us the previous evening), we were off.
The brewery town of Solan came and went like a breeze and we took a state highway towards Paonta Saheb
