Day 1: Chennai - Rameswaram - Madurai

Day 1: Chennai - Rameswaram - Madurai

The first day of our road trip had to be exciting. It started off in an interesting way. We (Aditi and me) were supposed to land in Chennai on Thursday evening by 10pm, get home by around 11:30pm and sleep for 4-5 hours before starting off at 4-5am in the morning. However, our flight got delayed by nearly 4 hours and we reached home at 2:30am. We had two options - either to start right then or start by 7-8am. The second option would have made the day-1 target impossible to get to. So, we decided to start right then after freshening up a bit.

Early in the morning, we got to NH45 quite soon. It was a bit dark, a bit of early morning drizzle and it had been some time since I had driven Swift - so I took good half an hour to get used to the car, the gear changes, get a measure of the brakes and how the car was behaving with a truck load of people and baggages inside! It was doing well frankly, I didn't notice any major difference in the way it was picking up. Additionally, the car had undergone some repair, but it felt good - the clutch was adjusted wrongly, but otherwise everything else was fine.

We drove all the way to Trichy (about 300 kms) and at 9am had a breakfast stop. The first part of the journey was done in quick time. The end goal was to reach KanyaKumari that day, so I thought we were reasonably on target.

From Trichy, we got on to NH 210 and we had about 200 kms to go for Rameswaram - a distance that I thought should take 3 hours 15 minutes on a lesser national highway. However, it took a lot longer, it took us good 5 and half hours to reach Rameswaram. NH210 clearly doesn't deserve to be termed a national highway, the maximum I would call is a lesser state highway. The road isn't good, its very narrow and goes through lots of towns where the speed drops to 10kmph from an otherwise impressive 30 kmph :-)

On NH210, I took a wrong turn somewhere and within a km or so we realised we were heading down the wrong way. I parked the car to understand the maps and GPS to see where we need to be heading. I realised I had to take a U-turn and get back to the previous crossing. I took the car further to the left to give myself space to take a U-turn.... and that's when, the left wheel dropped more than a foot down and the car was stuck. All of us got down the car and the right rear wheel was in the air. People around came to help us readily and it was so very nice of them. Seriously appreciate their concern and help as they lifted the front left part of the car and I powered back the car in reverse - the car immediately rolled out and it was a sigh of relief for us. Big thanks again to the people in that town - you made a rather difficult situatio easy for us.

On our way back, we started from Rameswaram at about 6:30pm. We had heard of a new 4-lane highway that had been constructed linking Rameswaram and Kanyakumari. Unfortunately despite our numerous attempts we couldn't find it. Finally we decided to take the long route to Kanya Kumari, through Madhurai.

I had not slept for more than 36 hours and at around 10-10:30pm, I started to feel the heat. So, I handed the car to Papa and peacefully slept thereafter. At around 11pm, we reached Madurai and realised that we all were tired and going further wasn't the greatest idea. Therefore we called it a day and were 200 kms short of our original plan. Thanks to the various detours in between, we had still done a good 751 kms for the day.