My journey to Mahakumbha 2013

Even though I had been thinking, talking about going to Kumbh since couple of months to family and friends, I was not sure if I would certainly do it.  Everybody appreciated my idea of visitng Kumbh on bike, and finally I got company.,Shashank Joshi, He wished to accompany me during the journey. But the idea of riding bike all the way long till Kumbh Mela wiped out by his and my family memebers, so with the fear fear of loosing freedom, loosing control of our journey we zeroed on Joshi’s car. We had planned to leave for kumbha on 3^rd Feb 2013, but left for on 2^nd itself, so we had one extra day in our travel bag and Joshi’s instantly pushed the thought of visiting Jhansi and Orchha. I welcomed the idea and we changed our route to Prayag.

            Initially we had planned to go via Bhopal à Jabalpur à Katni à Allahabad, but we continued on NH3 from Indore and headed for Jhansi. It added almost 3 more hundred kilometers in drive that to very average conditioned road from Dewas(MP).

As we left Nashik behind , we were amazed by the condition of the road. The road from Nashik till Indore is top class road. We could drive smoothly even at 100 kms/hr. So instead of going via the planned route we continued on NH3, post Dewas this road was referred as AB road, don’t know the reason why the name was given as AB road. But this AB road is a single lane road with very heavy traffic.

One thing I missed about MP. Forget the recently developed Indore city, as we drove along this road we could hardly see bare piece of land. Where ever we turned our focus, it was only green land with  farms of Gehu and chana. And my perception about MP started to change. Land is highly fertile with proper irrigation system. Inspite of this we could see “Shettal” in huge numbers. There wasn’t a single, even a small hill, all land is plane, with no fences, no bandhs, and no nongreen material.

So we headed to Jhansi, the earlier night we failed to locate proper lodging place, and we heard from some truck drivers that the region was bit dangerous to drive at night as decoits might hunt you down. This is one reason. Second is the condition of the road was not so great especially when we had driven on NH3, Third we had decided to drive at nights. With all these reasons we towed ourselves to a Shudh Shakahari Dhaba, to to our surprise they offerd us special Egg dishes. We had dinner. The time came to pay for the food and to our and your as well surprise for dinner of both of us the bill was only 124 Rs. You might not miss what I am trying to highlight the difference in cost. The “Mahagai” in “Maharashtra”

We stayed there and slept in the car itself along the AB road. Next morning we had to reach Jhansi. With the thought in the mind about what made the Mughals to intrude to Deccan if they already were ruling such a prosperous land. May be the answers were in tomorrows journey.

We started driving early in the morning from Guna to Jhansi……