Experiencing the GQ
Experiencing the GQ
The GQ or Golden Quadrilateral project of the NHAI (National Highway Authority of India) is a very interesting attempt at building good roads. These roads are better than almost any other road we have seen in India till date, other than experimental pockets here and there.
This story is about my experience with one little part of the GQ project.
The GQ project
The first stage of the GQ project aims to build a quadrilateral connecting Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai. This quad is apparently almost complete, apart from the stretches through two states: Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The stretches in Bihar were being held up purely due to the local criminal gangs, who were demanding that the contractor buys stone chips from them at four times the normal price. They threatened to shoot any truck which brought "metal" as stone chips are called, from far away. Since these gangs have full backing of local politicians, nothing moved. The contractors quickly calculated their costs and realised that at those prices for "metal", they would make losses, so they simply suspended work. Recently, the local government in Bihar has changed and Nitish Kumar is the new CM. He has instructed the police in simple terms, "Please go after all crime; I will not come in your way." The state police have in a matter of months put three local state legislators from the ruling party behind bars for crimes committed. Nitish Kumar has not stopped the police; he has kept his word. So now the GQ project in Bihar is progressing at top speed.
Once the quadrilateral is over, the next is a cross. Will they call it the Platinum Cross, I wonder? The vertical strip runs from somewhere in the North (Pathankot, IIRC) to Kanniyakumari. The horizontal strip runs from Porbandar in Gujarat to Silchar in Assam via Gorakhpur, Purnea, and the chicken's neck between Bhutan and Bangladesh. No, it does not touch Bombay or Calcutta, unfortunately.
The roads that the GQ builds are all technically quite advanced. They have a surface which looks unlike anything I have seen. It does not look like concrete slabs, neither does it look like tar. And it is more even than concrete surfaces I have driven on. All roads have 2+2 lanes + divider down the middle. This allows for a motoring experience just short of expressways. And they are also building expressways in bits and pieces here and there, like the 100-km stretch between Baroda and Ahmedabad.
All these roads levy toll from vehicles using them. You can spend Rs.300 in tolls in a long day of driving down one of these roads, in bits and pieces at various points.
To Rajasthan we go
We decided to do a family trip to Rajasthan. My wife had bought a good car a few months back, which was showing signs of being an admirable road machine for long road trips. It is a Ford Fiesta sedan with a 1.4-litre CRDI diesel engine. The Indian Fiesta is a very recent release, and is quite unlike the car of the same name available in North America, I believe.
My parents, my wife and I decided to attempt a road trip of about 2,500 kilometres in about eight to nine days, with me as the sole driver. My parents are 60+, and I am on the wrong side of forty, not exactly built like a commando. On the face of it, this is not the kind of thing that people find very logical. But then adventures are rarely logical.
We decided to plan the road trip with relatively short stretches of drives per day, not exceeding seven to eight hours of driving if we could avoid it. So the first day was Bombay to Baroda. The second day would hit Udaipur. The third day would try to make Jaipur. We would camp in Jaipur for a few days, then head back the same way. Some parts of our plans were fluid, but we felt that with cellphones, ATMs and a good car, we should be able to survive. As it turned out, we did quite well.
Bombay to Baroda
Our first day needed navigating out of Bombay. On a map, Bombay is just one dot. At ground level, Bombay is a world by itself. And navigating out of Bombay is something which can be lovely or exasperating depending on how much of that traffic you want to handle. We live in New Bombay, so heading north through the NH8 to Rajasthan meant that we had to cross the complete city from East to West through Thane before we reached NH8. That stretch till NH8 was irritating, and took us about 90 minutes.
Once we reached the NH8, the road became a 2+2 lane thing with divider (henceforth I will refer to such a configuration as 2+2+D), and we picked up speed a bit, heading straight north merging with all the traffic heading for Vapi. Vapi arrived and dropped astern about 90 minutes later, while we were doing speeds of between 90 and 120km/hr. The diesel motor was humming along beautifully, and the joy of being at the wheel of a good car were already beginning to make the entire exercise seem worthwhile.
After Vapi was left behind, we headed north towards Navsari. We stopped for a short break somewhere after Vapi. This was one of the Reliance A-Plus stations which are built around petrol pumps. They are clean, fairly well maintained, and serve simple vegetarian food in clean utensils. They are certainly a cut above the dhaba in terms of maintenance and management, but the food is not one-tenth as interesting as dhaba food.
Lunch was at a newly-commissioned restaurant just beyond Navsari: the Hare Krishna Hotel. This was where I had my first taste of rotla, some sort of thick bread or roti made out of bajra. Making the rotla that thick and still ensuring that it's soft and well-cooked throughout is an art. It's apparently cooked on low heat on top of an inverted clay pot, to ensure even cooking. Apart from the rotla the rest of the food was a bit spicy but well-made, and the staff was very patient and attentive. We had hit the road with little expectations, and this meal was really pleasant. We must have taken almost an hour over lunch before we hit the road again.
Very soon after this restaurant, the road quality deteriorated. The road continued to be a 2+2+D stretch, but the road surface had potholes just like any other road we have seen in the last few decades in India. Though the road was quite wide, the traffic was very heavy, mostly comprising trucks. You can literally see the powerhouse of Gujarat on its roads. We continued on this road at speeds varying from 50 to 80km/hr, till, at one point, we hit a traffic jam.
Peering ahead, we could see the road curving to our left for kilometres, and the entire stretch was jammed with stalled traffic. Quite a frightening sight. We must have driven in that stop-and-go traffic for more than an hour, before we decided to break rank and cross over to the Dark Side, i.e. the right side of the road. We essentially crossed over to the opposite side, where we were directly facing the oncoming traffic. We then hugged the extreme right edge of the road, switched on the hazard lights, and with all four yellow lights flashing, we began making our way down towards Baroda, passing literally hundreds of trucks stalled beside us. Luckily for us, oncoming traffic was quite light, so we didn't have too much trouble making our way along the road. In my rearview mirror, I could see at least half a dozen other cars had decided to join my slipstream. I too had decided to attempt this after having been inspired by other cars, buses, and trucks which done it before me.
After travelling for perhaps five kilometres this way, we came to a point where we could see the source of the jam.
There was a river, called the Tapi IIRC, with two parallel bridges: one northbound and the other southbound. The southbound bridge had been damaged in the monsoons of a few months back; it was now being repaired. So the northbound bridge was being shared by traffic in both directions. A few vehicles from each side were being permitted to pass at a time. We joined the head of the queue, and were allowed to make our way through in a few minutes. By that time, the sun had set.
We reached Baroda when it was dark, and we asked any friendly auto-rickshaw driver or passer-by to make our way to the railway station. My wife called up the hotel from her cellphone and asked for directions too. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to navigate in a totally unfamiliar city at night. I was fully expecting that we would have to go round and round in circles while various passers-by showed utter confusion when asked for directions. It turned out to be quite the opposite: though not many people knew the hotel, everyone knew the railway station and the hotel was bang next to it. We pulled into the hotel at perhaps seven-thirty, after covering about five hundred and fifty kilometres.
The hotel was clean, functional, and strictly vegetarian. We asked for room service, and got very functional food to take care of dinner. The room rent was a very reasonable Rs.1200 per night per room, food extra. The next morning, we were out after breakfast, slowly pulling out of Baroda, heading for Udaipur, our gateway to Rajasthan. We must have left the edge of Baroda by 9:30 in the morning.
Baroda to Udaipur
Udaipur would be our first stop in Rajasthan. We had no curiosity about Gujarat, treating it as a state to cross to reach Rajasthan. Gujarat deserves better, I guess, but we were pressed for time. The distance from Baroda to Udaipur is a shade less than 400km, IIRC. We thought we would be able to make it comfortably in one day, in fact, comfortably before sunset. As it turned out, it was a really short and comfortable ride.
Once you exit Baroda, your next major city on the road map is Ahmedabad. And you see the full splendour of the GQ Project in the NE-1, the National Expressway 1, which connects Baroda to Ahmedabad. This is a 2+2+D road, unlike the other famous expressway that all Bombayites are familiar with: the Bombay-Pune expressway, arguably the first expressway built in India, covering 90 out of the 120-and-odd kilometres of the Bombay-Pune stretch. I had flown along the Bombay-Pune expressway in a variety of cars at a variety of speeds a number of times. Here, I was faced with the NE-1.
The NE-1 was easier to drive along. Due to the absence of hills, the road was largely straight. It was also much better surfaced than the Bombay-Pune expressway. In fact, almost all the GQ stretches that I saw were smoother surfaced than the Bombay-Pune expressway. I have no idea why this is the case. The other difference is the narrower GQ roads, compared to the 3+3+D structure of the Bombay-Pune expressway. All the GQ roads are 2+2+D only.
We flew along the NE-1 at 150 to 160km/hr without any trouble. I could hold 150km/hr for minutes at a time. The car remained perfectly controllable, and felt very sure on the ground and steerable. I have never driven a car which handles better than this one on long drives.
At the entrance to Ahmedabad, we discovered with relief that we were to bypass the city and take something called the Sardar Patel Ring Road which would take us around the city, towards Gandhinagar. So we continued travelling around the city till we asked some friendly trucker and were told that we should have taken a right turn a kilometre back. We took the next right turn instead, and headed for Gandhinagar.
The little bits of Gandhinagar we saw were very impressive, with lots of greenery and very wide roads. We passed by a traffic island which had a small IAF fighter jet on display, passed a huge chimney of a power station, and headed out beyond Gandhinagar towards Himmatnagar. This road proved to be a standard GQ configuration, and we could comfortably maintain speeds over 130km/hr. Soon after Himmatnagar, the road began to meander, and we began encountering lovely hilly terrain. This terrain is rocky and rugged, not dry and sandy like the popular images we have of a desert. There were shrubs and trees, and we encountered the occasional camel-drawn cart being ridden by a turbanned local chap. We could smell the Rajasthan magic in the air.
We drove into Udaipur by about 14:00 in the afternoon. We had not even stopped anywhere for lunch, and we were surprised to have made it to the town so fast. We drove through what appeared to be a main road, which rapidly gave up pretences of being anything "main" and became a narrow small-town road, and wound up and down the hill-side in a most confused manner. I rapidly fell in love with the town. There was no hurry, no pressure to move or make way, though there was quite a bit of traffic. We began asking around for Gulab Baug, and made our way past the entrance to the Lake Palace, down an incline, to Hotel Mahendra Prakash.
The experience of this hotel is unlike any hotel I have ever seen, let alone stayed in. I later realised that this was not uncommon in Udaipur, because a lot of hotels are actually small establishments running out of centuries-old havelis or mansions of rich noblemen from the pre-British era. The fittings, fixtures, and furniture of the rooms are from an era we do not see any reminders of today. These recently renovated havelis retain all these doors, windows, wardrobes, and so on, and add thoroughly modern basins and geysers in the bathrooms to give you an unreal experience.
We ordered food that afternoon at the hotel's restaurant and enjoyed a good meal. Then we went for a leg-stretching walk down to the Lake Palace Hotel. I stayed outside with the camera bags because the security chaps said the palace would close for the night in less than an hour, and I didn't fancy paying Rs.200 for a camera pass to get just 45 minutes of clicking time. The others went in and looked around, and reportedly had a good time climbing up and down uncountable flights of steep steps. We then walked around aimlessly for some time, and while the ladies went shopping, I went back to the hotel for a very leisurely evening of black tea, snacks, and book reading in the small poolside garden.
So we finished the entire stretch from Baroda to Udaipur, a distance slightly less than 400km, in about four and a half hours including a very brief stop to stretch our legs.
From Udaipur to Jaipur
We left at about nine the next morning for Jaipur. While entering Udaipur, we had seen that the NH8 which we had taken continues straight past the Udaipur turn-off to Jaipur. So we headed out that way towards the same turnoff, and turned left towards Jaipur.
This road turned out to be a disappointment. My friend Ajay who has some access to the NHAI had sworn that the entire Delhi-Bombay stretch of the GQ was now ready in 2+2+D format. But this road we travelled on, which was undeniably the NH8 as per many road signs, was just an old Indian highway, with 1+1 and no divider. This means that all the classic Indian road hazards of having to step into the path of incoming traffic in order to overtake a slow-moving truck were all very much in evidence on these 400km of road.
The trip was uneventful, apart from a few interesting stops. We stopped at one place on a hillside on a whim because we saw a lovely lake with a ghat where we saw a bunch of picnicking people in their shorts taking dips in the water. We stopped again after an hour or so when we crossed a herd of camels, just to click a few photos. Later, after another hour or so, we bypassed Ajmer town and went a bit ahead and stopped at a dhaba for lunch. It must've been about 1300 or 1330 by then.
We had a solid meal, of the kind that hungry travellers can get only in dhabas. All the food was oily, spicy, tasty and fresh. Luvvly.
We reached Jaipur again by about 1430, and parked on the dusty road outside Hotel Neelam on a Sunday afternoon.