We started off from Madurai and the highway to Kanya Kumari was a beauty. We covered 200 odd kms in just over 2 hours and then slowed down near Kanya Kumari to take a few pics with the windmills. We got to Kanya Kumari in quick time, thanks to the 4-lane highway, which is a part of the north-south corridor.
After doing touristy stuff at Kanya Kumari, we headed north-west-wards to Kerala on NH 47. I had decent memories of NH 47 - 15 years back, I had travelled on this highway and it was fast back then. Unfortunately, it was absolutely slow and clearly didn't look anywhere close to be a national highway. Kerala, is a state with end-less towns - one town ends and the other starts and thus there is absolutely no gap in between. In the last 15 years, clearly the traffic has increased a few times, but the road has not changed at all. This meant that on a national highway we were driving at around 30kmph - it took us hours and hours to get from Kanyakumari to Trivandrum to Allepy - at Allepy, we had a typical Kerala dinner and we headed off again towards Cochin, Alwaye, etc. Given our slow progress through the day, we made two decisions which in many ways changed our entire plan:
- There was no way we could reach Managalore - it would have meant driving all night - we wanted to play safer than that!
- Doing the same 30kmph through Kerala for another day didn't inspire us at all. So, we decided to change our route and head towards Tamil Nadu side (Coimbotore) and stop where ever we could
At 1:30am at night, we reached a small town before Palghat and found a decent place to stay. That was it for this long day, a day when we travelled the first 200 odd kms in very quick time and the next 400 at very low average speed of ~30 kmph. A frustrating day, leaving us with plenty to think of for the next day. The pressure to "make up" lost time had started to weigh on us.
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