Its amazing how trips usually happen. We have done two major tips in a short while - the first being to US (Alaska, Grand Canyon and likes) and the second being this epic road trip and these two trips have been amazing. But, this is where the common link to these trips ends.
For the US trip, we did close to 2 months of planning, we knew what exactly we were doing, our vacations had been approved by our bosses 3 months in advance, we had all the air ticket bookings done a month and half in advance and we even had our hotels and car rentals booked 2-3 weeks in advance. I personally have never planned for any trip in such great detail, but it was really helpful as we were going to the land of unknown as far as we were concerned.
The 10,000 km India Periphery road trip was a completely different story. It was by far not a planned trip even by my "usually unplanned" standards. I am making a job shift and didn't really know if I would get a break in between. It only started getting clear by 3rd to 4th week of August that I could possibly have 3-4 weeks of break in between. My first reaction to the break was "I will chill out big time, do some really chilled out activities like photography classes, but otherwise laze around to glory!" As a minor deviation for the chilling out plan, I planned to go for a "Periphery of Malaysia" drive - probably a 2,500 kms drive, provided Aditi could take a couple of days off from office. That's as far as imagination could go, given the mental frame that was so focused on having a minus 20 degrees chill vacation.
As I was narrating my vacation plan to Aditi, she gave a completely different twist to my chill-out mental frame - probably 90% of out of pure concern and 10% out of jealousy of my chill days ahead ;-). Jokes apart, it was this one sentence that changed my entire outlook to this 3-4 week break. Aditi said "When will you ever get a 4 week vacation? So, do something that you always wanted to"
Within a few micro-seconds, I said, it had to be a major road trip. My end-goal in driving is to do a world road trip. Clearly, I don't consider myself ready for that big stage as yet. Further, that trip requires 2-3 months of travel time and more importantly tons of planning in advance to sort out the route, get the visas done and get a few sponsors roped in to ensure we don't spend rest of our lives repaying back the debt! So, that was not happening, but a step towards this goal was surely possible.
We thus thought of 2 different types of trips to start with. First thought was to do a Pan-Europe trip starting from Portugal/Spain and driving across the alps and then down to Italy or Greece. The only problem here was that we wanted to have a vacation where we would get some time to see some part of Europe as well and from a pure logistics stand point, 2 weeks were just not enough to get sufficient visas for the trip. So, that thought ended after a very initial feasibility assessment!
The second idea, which really did give me a kick was to drive my Avante from Singapore to India - that sounded like a great idea and we thought it was possible to do it. So, for a day, I went into deep research for this trip, sorting out the route and reading blogs to find out the alternatives. Unfortunately, I came to know that Burma-India border is not a very friendly one - to the extent that for now, no road traffic is permitted there. The other option was to enter China from Thailand and Laos and drive a lot through China and then enter either India or Nepal at a much later stage. This was a theoretical possibility, but we didn't get to read too many positives about these borders as well. Further, there was a lot of unknown and I would only do it after a lot of research. All this meant that even this option to going from Singapore to India would be difficult to get through in a matter of a week from the time we were thinking.
So, we thought, why not India? It's a lot easier to plan given we know a fair bit collectively about the different parts of the country. Finally, to our plan we added "Leh" and going up to the highest motor-able road on earth, that started to get me interested and we decided to do a road trip in India.
Following this decision, there were a lot of options made which I have described in detail in another post. We asked our parents to join the trip and they immediately agreed to the idea! This was an inspiration in itself for us and from then on, 5 of us planned the details of the trip together.
The big question mark here was will Aditi get 2 weeks off at a short notice? We were extremely delighted to hear a positive from the office and that set the ball rolling. I had not expected that her office would agree to this break at such short notice - a big thanks to them!
We had two options - to either start on 3rd September or on 10th September. As we were planning for the trip, Aditi came to know of a few meetings that she would need to attend in Chennai on 21st - which virtually left us with the option of starting on 3rd September only!
This was tight, we had around a week to embark on this epic trip, with lots to do before that. We had to plan the route, do the air ticket bookings, get the car in Chennai ready for the trip and make other arrangements for the trip. Fortunately, we did know a bit about the roads and with our collective network of friends, we had access to a lot of information in quick time. The main road block was that we had to get the car ready and get GPS, maps and other trip essentials from India. So, for this, Papa and Mummy flew in 3 days before Aditi and I do start the preparation in India.
Looking back, it is tough to believe that we could pull out the toughest trip that we have done from non-existence to life in just under 10 days - a big thanks to the contributions of our friends that really made this possible. Please refer to the acknowledgements section to see how much we have been helped by others during this trip.
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