Last week (I wrote this in May 2010), I drove to Shimla with my wife and kid. I had a fine time, really. The plan was to leave home in Ghaziabad at 4:00 a.m. sharp, as I didn’t want to get caught in traffic that builds upon the highway during the day. We decided to retire for the night early so that everyone (especially me, the driver) could get some rest ahead of the long drive.
Well, that was the idea until a phone call from my sister-in-law to my wife at 10 p.m. enquiring about the trip shook me out of my just-about-to-fall-asleep stage, never to be able to fall asleep again—ditto for wifey. Instead of tossing and turning in bed for a few hours of elusive sleep, we left earlier than planned. So we woke up our sleeping 9-year-old son, took out the car, pointed it toward Shimla, and went home at 2:45 a.m.
NH 1 is a pretty good road, and I basically focused on the black strip of asphalt rapidly advancing toward my car wheels and ensuring that my speed stayed between 80 and 90 km per hour. Other cars were heading in a similar direction, doing roughly the same things. It was all very comfortable, and my only worry was that I should not feel drowsy- something I accomplished quite easily by the sheer weight of responsibility and kids’ lives in my hands kind of pressure.
Sonny boy was asleep for most of the drive during the night; wifey bravely stayed awake for a couple of hours before dozing off to sweet slumber on the seat beside me. Soon, it was Beatthe les on the car stereo, NH1, and me. Towns came and went(the by-passes let you escape the innards of the towns – S—pat, Panipat, Karnal, Kurukshetra, and Ambala fro),m where one branched off to NH22 and the road to Zirakpur and Kalka.
By about 8:30 in the morning, we were in Kalka and beginning to climb. Everyone was fully awake now, and we were taking in the noisy, narrow, and ramshackle lanes of Kalka town even while climbing all the time. Soon, it was genuine hill territory, and we kept on climbing steep mountainsides, with wifey and kid growing more and more alarmed.
Shortly afterward, we went downhill toward Solan, famous for its brewery and mushrooms. I made a mental note to buy mushrooms when I returned home to Our Planetary.
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Anyway, it was climbing time again, and I was busy doing what I love the most: driving in the high Himalayas through pine, deodar, rhododendron, and oak country- nothing in the world can match that. The sky was a deep blue, and I could hear the piercing cry of mountain birds. The altitude change blocked my ears.
We stopped at Dharampur for the mandatory breakfast of aloo ka parantha and sweet tea and resumed the journey fully refreshed. The rest of the drive up was again through spectacular terrain; thoroughly enjoyable except for the fact that every ten minutes a t, a truck, humongous Volvo bus the size of a Jumbo Jet, or other assorted large vehicles would come down from the opposite direction in what appeared to be sonic speed.
They would proceed wildly towards you and, exactly at the moment of passing by, tip the body of their vehicle dangerously close to thats (like one might tip a hat to a lady). When you thought that you would be pushed 2000 feet downhill, they would swerve away.
