Day 3: Palghat to Davangere

We made a post-breakfast start from Palghat and headed towards Coimbatore. It took us sometime to get through Coimbatore as we had to cross the city to get to NH 209. After half an hour of city drive, we made it to NH 209.

NH 209, like all other 200+ national highway numbers is relatively narrow, but we could maintain 70-80 kmph speeds as it was relatively empty and not so bumpy. After doing some distance, we reached the ghats. There, in time, we climbed up through 27 hair pin bends - a great experience. We did those 27 hair pin bends in about 10 kms or so, which means rapid climb up the mountain. This was the first real test for Swift - it faired very well, at so stage did it feel power deficient despite being fully loaded. Driving though the hair pin bends was an experience in itself!

The funny part was once we reached the top of the ghats, there was almost a plain road - and we are still to figure out how we got back to sea level as there was no major down hill drive at any stage. :-)

We continued our drive, the trip navigators teamed up to find the best possible way to avoid Bangalore and we found that taking a state highway to Tumukur would probably be the best bet. Again, this state highway took a lot of time to travel, 70 odd kms in 2.5 hours or so, all thanks to poor roads with tons of potholes.

Beyond that phase, we entered golden quadrilateral for the first time and the drive was a breeze. It had been post-sunset and head lights had come on, but we could maintain a comfortable 90-100 kmph from there on. I personally like to keep it slow at night and therefore didn't go any beyond that magic 90-100 kmph. At this speed, the engine is at its peak performance - the drive felt like a glide!

Shortly thereafter, we made a night stop at Davangere - we had to reverse the cycle somehow - for the first two days, we had been driving till late at night. Now, we thought of stopping by early evening - 8-8:30pm or so and then having an early start next morning.

Overall, we did 609 kms on Day 3 - a lot of it on not-so-great highways and now we were probably 3/4th of a day behind our original schedule - our target was to get to Pune by Day 3.