Bangalore-Kannur(via Sultan Bathery, Mananthavady)

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It was a vacation to our hometown Kannur in the sweltering hot summer time. This time we drove without any long breaks and descended the western ghats via Mananthavadi ghat roads which were in pretty good condition being inside Kerala border. Karnataka Government has no incentives to keep the Ghat roads to Kerala(Perumadi ghats) in good shape.

We hit the road at 7am from Bangalore via the latest and really nice NICE road that is just 3KM off from where we live. Except for the toll booth stops, we were at Mysore road in no time and it felt like we were driving in a western highway. Whatever criticisms that you may have against NICE, they have done a fantastic job in building the peripheral road. Creating free-way routes like this around the city may be the best way to ease traffic within the city. But there are still rough edges around the infamous Gottigere changeover at Bannerghatta Road and at Kanakapura road overpass. The toll collection also is a bit haphazard, which I guess would improve once the intersections are completed. While I am no big fan of big city based development, if you are going that way, you need interventions like NICE expressways. Unfortunately it would encourage travel by personal vehicles which I believe has shot up already. So now it is easy to get out of the city except towards Hyderabad on NH-7.

Mysore road was clogged with holiday travellers which we covered in about 2.5 hours. There were many road humps that seems to have sprouted on the highway near most of the villages which may make sense because there is access to the highway for the public. Hopefully, the NICE expressway would materialize some day. Same was the case with Mysore-Ooty road.

Gundelpet-Sultan Bathery was a quiet and easy ride, we were at Sultan Bathery at around 12 noon and reached Mananthavady at 1pm. Drive towards Manathavady from S.Bathery was not that easy comparatively, but was still good. We had to stop at many places to ask for directions, but being in a green country, it was enjoyable as well. We had lunch at Centry Hotel, Manathavadi - food was ok, except for sighting some fish in the vegetarian sambar which gave us some ideas for a new recipe!

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Descent down towards Kuthuparamba was a bit shaky with our 1-year old girl having ghat-sickness and throwing up a couple of times. She was asleep last time when we went up and down the ghats, but this time it was her play time and she was up most of the time. But having a Paediatrician in the car was a lot of help. May be we should have let more fresh air instead of depending on the aircondition in the car. We reached home by 5PM, which made it a 10 hour, 400KM drive from Bangalore. An earlier start from Bangalore.

It was also a drive without any colas and bottled juices for me. I stocked up tender coconut water and stopped over before Gundelpet to refill the bottle with more of it. But tender coconut is not easy to find in the coconut country unless you can climb a coconut tree. Coconuts are meant for serious business maybe. The other thing I carried was a peanut cake in jagri, which kept the fatigue away.

We took the same route back, but I wasn't well hydrated the day before which seemed to have caused some trouble for my bended knees after 300KMs on the road. But the baby slept during our climb up and she didn't have any problems except that it was tough to keep her in the car seat later. Mysore road was traffic free and NICE road was awesome at the end of a tiring drive except for the last mile problem at the Bannerghatta Road junction couple of kilometers from home where we were stuck for 30 minutes.

While the drive up and down was pretty good, it kind of blew away the carbon I saved by my car free commute for the past 3 months