Reminiscing the South Indian road trip

Almost a year back, we started with a plan for a small trip Bangalore. What was an innocent 2-3 days trip to a lovely city with the aid of sheer adventurism and longing wanderlust snowballed to a 2-weeks, ~3300 km, east coast to west coast South-Indian road trip.

The idea of touching the sand on the east coast and west coast in the same trip was the main trigger if I try to recall by clearing the happy fog of colourful memories a bit. With that romantic idea, somewhere the seeds of visiting a historically important place called Hampi were sown. Somewhere in between, other nearby locations like Pattadakal, Badami, and Aihole were brought into the travel plan. West coast was finalized as Goa much before we even began to discuss, but to give the trip due justice, we planned Gokarna en route Goa. For east coast we picked Pondicherry. At the centre of it all was Bangalore! The place that made us think of steering away a bit on its either side.

Once the tentatively-final plan was charted, we began detailing. Talking to experienced people, Eicher maps, tons of blogs, travel forums, shared spreadsheets, hotels, guest houses, best routes, highways, and thus slowly all the little circuitry started connecting bit by bit.

The first decision was whether to go east before west or vice versa. The heart said west (read Goa) before east, but the mind and experienced folks said otherwise. Eventually east to west made more sense. Then we resumed our information gathering for the trip.

Thereby, a grand road trip was planned in our little Wagon R and the three of us took off!

The route was:

Pune > Bijapur > Badami > Pattadakal > Aihole (we gave this a miss eventually) > Hampi > Bangalore (planned this slight detour while sitting right near the paddy fields and rocky boulders of Hampi) > Pondicherry > Bangalore > Jog Falls > Goa (skipped Gokarna)

Dates: October 12, 2013 to October 26, 2013

The route we travelled

It's almost a year now when we initiated this beautiful road trip. For almost the entire year I have felt that I need to write a travelogue about the trip. It will take a lot of dedication to sit, think back and actually pen down the beautiful feelings in fitting (or close to fitting) words. I'll try and attempt it. Someday, I'll look back at these words and they'll connect me to the feelings hidden deep inside.

Here's to wandering!