Periphery of India!

Here is our route map (in red): We tried to keep it to periphery of India as much as possible

Our Route: Periphery of India

"A jounrey of thousand miles begins with a single step" - "A thought for the day" that I was made to by-heart and speak at morning assembly in 4th Standard, but I probably understood its true meaning a lot later!

 

Well, as described in the earlier posts, we only had 10 days from the time the idea of doing this trip first popped up to embarking on our journey.

 

In the first couple of days, I tried to run through various options of what we could possible do in 17-18 days. The common theme across these options was that I wanted to do close to 10,000 kms. Upon understanding our motivation further, we realised that there were 3 things that were motivating us and if we did it, would be the highlight of our trip:

 

1. Doing as close to 10,000 kms as we possibly could
2. The idea of doing "Periphery of India" excited us a lot
    
3. Going up to the highest motorable road, a bit beyond Leh has always been a cherished dream and the very thought of including that in this trip was exciting. We were willing to sacrifice some portion of the 10,000 km target to drive up to Leh
    
4. Having Agra, Jaisalmer as part of our trip - I had not seen Taj Mahal before and the thought of being at Sand Dunes in Jaisalmer did excite us a lot.
5. The more that we thought about #3, the more we came to know of the damaged roads and a realistic assessment sort of ruled out Leh. Then, our next point of interest was Sikkim and some amazing places there, including the drive up to nearly the highest motorable road near lake Gurudongmar.

 

We tossed the above attractions and tried to fit it in a 18 day plan. It was tough to begin with, add to it, the incessant rains meant that both Leh and Sikkim had been cut-off thanks to landslides. After much deliberation, we decided to leave our Leh and keep Sikkim as an option that we would evaluate mid way through the trip.

 

Unfortunarely, the rains continued to Early September and think black clouds casted over our Sikkim plans as well. So, we decided to do Manali instead.

 

As part of the trip, now that we were doing the periphery of India, we wanted to have some very significant points as our Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern points. It was during one such discussion, we asked our parents if they would like to join us for the trip and we were surprised to hear a very enthusiastic "yes" to the idea!! As we discussed the options more with them, they also wanted to do the "Dhams" - an idea that went well with our initial plan of having some very interesting places as the 4 corners of our route. So, we decided to include Rameswaram, Dwaraka and Puri. Badrinath was not included as our parents had there been before.

 

So, the final route that we eventually took was:

 

Chennai - Rameswaram - Madhurai - Kanyakumari - Trivandrum - Alqaye - Palghat - Tumukur - Davangere - Pune - Thane - Varodara - Ahmedabad - Rajkot - Jamnagar - Dwarka - Morbi - Jaisalmer - Sri Ganganagar - Patiala - Chandigarh - Manali - Bilaspur - Ambala - Delhi bye-pass - Mathura - Agra - Allahabad - Dhanbad - Kolkata bye-pass - Bhubaneshwar - Puri - Konark - Vishakapatnam - Vijaywada - Chennai

 

If we were to include Gangtok in the above route, we would have crossed 11,000 kms, but that couldn't happen eventually. All in all, it was a great route and we just made our 10,000 km target - more on that in the next post with detailed analysis of our driving statistics.