300th issue special: Unforgettable 300km road trips

Road trips burn themselves into long-term memory thanks to the car, the companions, or the encounters. We recall six such 300km motoring moments from India as well as abroad. 

Khardung La to Baralacha La (353km)

My establishment as a travel writer and photographer with self-drive road trips as a forte was thanks to Autocar India’s Driving Destinations that kicked off in June 2001. It was a monthly feature outlining noteworthy road trips across the country. Thrown into the mix were expeditions pioneered by the magazine – the first being K2K or Kargil to Kanyakumari in a Maruti 800 and a Mercedes Benz E240 (W210) in October 2001. Today, the term K2K is common in road trip vocabulary, but it was coined and established when Autocar India did the expedition. 

In that year, India was at the tail end of the analogue era. Content was captured via Ektachrome from Kodak and consumed through printed matter on paper. Phone calls at remote destinations were made from STD booths. 

The E240 stands at the top of the world amongst 4x4s on Oct 6, 2001. 

At that time, too, Khardung La was the world’s highest motorable road, at 18,380 feet. To drive from Manali to Leh, a 4x4 SUV was deemed mandatory. We drove the M800 and the E240 from Delhi to Kargil and then from Kargil to Kanyakumari, traversing the Manali-Leh road twice. It was probably the first time a Mercedes-Benz sedan in stock form had been driven up that road, and it was certainly the first time one stood at the highest motorable road in the world. 

On the drive from Khardung La to Baralacha La, I became used to seeing shocked expressions at the sight of an E240 making its way down from Leh to Manali. It was like seeing a thoroughbred racehorse shackled to a plough in a rural field. 

The cars were the stars over 4,000km from K2K. The best with the bestselling one.

At Tanglang La, a German tourist huffing and puffing up to Leh on a bicycle gave me a dressing down filled with righteous indignation.

“How dare you bring this car here? You people don’t have any respect for advanced engineering. You’re ruining a fine automobile!” and so on. I humoured him for a few minutes, countering his rants with a smile and some soothing comments about how it was my car and none of his business. I sympathetically added that maybe the high altitude had impaired his intellectual ability – that is, if he had some to start with, given that he was cycling from Manali to Leh. 

Finally, I politely told him that if he didn’t stop his rude and racist tirade, I’d throw his bicycle off the pass. That sent him on his way, pedalling furiously, and throwing dark and thunderous looks over his shoulder in my direction.  

Johannesburg to Mpumalanga (300km)

Mpumalanga is South Africa’s smallest province and it means “The Place Where the Sun Rises” in the Nguni language. 

South African Tourism asked me to visit the region and suggested that I travel between destinations in small planes. But I preferred to drive, which they thought was not very safe for a tourist. When I insisted, they made me sign an indemnity bond absolving them of all responsibility should anything happen to me – mainly if I was mugged.

It remains one of my most memorable drives. The beauty of Mpumalanga’s landscape, the fabulous roads through it and the profusion of wildlife make it a great self-drive destination. 

I was caught outside the car when these two rhinoceroses broke cover and strolled across the road.

There was just one instance when I thought the indemnity bond might come into play, though. It was when I drove from the Sabi River Sun Resort in Hazyview to Sabi Sabi Game Resort, and along the way, I stopped to take a few pictures of the car. 

A couple of rhinos casually lumbered out of the shrubbery, and I was about 10 feet away from my Hyundai i20. One of the rhinos made a mock charge. That’s when I thought about what I would write in my rental car damage report: ‘Rammed by an irritated rhino’.

Fortunately, it went back to grazing peacefully while I strapped myself in to get going.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. I could get into the car, and then the rhinos circled it a few times before deciding that grazing was more fulfilling than engagement and got back to the grass.

Puebla to Oaxaca (414 km)

When Mercedes-Benz launched the SLS AMG in March 2010, they had the media drive from Puebla to Oaxaca in Mexico. That’s because it was in Mexico in November 1952 that a pair of Mercedes-Benz 300 SL racing sports coupés, driven by Karl Kling and Hermann Lang, took the first and second places, respectively, in the third Carrera Panamericana – a gruelling 3,100km road race. The Puebla to Oaxaca route was a part of this race.  

With empty Mexican highways and many moments in the realm of 220kph, it was a fun day indeed.

The SLS AMG, which is the spiritual successor of the W194, defines exhilaration at the wheel. My pulse raced while motoring this coupe on the twisty Pan-American Highway from Puebla to Oaxaca. The middle section was 320km of pure bliss. Terror, confidence, joy and exhilaration rapidly seared through me as the SLS, its exhaust roaring with immodest eagerness, urged me to take a corner at an eye-popping pace and then went around it with the poise and grace of a ballerina performing a pirouette. More emotions surged through my soul in those five seconds around the curve than I usually experience in one day.

Terror came back when I saw a police car – a souped-up Dodge Charger – flagging me down. At 185kph, I had been going way above the stipulated speed limit for Mexican Highways, which is 110kph.

The first and only time that I was stopped by a cop and told to go faster.

But the policeman’s manner was amicable, laced with some obvious envy. He told me I wasn’t going fast enough and I should amp it up a bit to extract some more pleasure from this beautiful car. “Go faster, my friend. Today, you have a free pass.”

For that one day, traffic was blocked on certain sections of the test route, and the police were politely looking the other way. After that, the halters were pulled off from all the 563 horses in the crankcase: the speedometer often hit the 243kph limiter, and brake discs glowed as the SLS went from 0 to 100kph in just 3.8 seconds and to 200 in 12. It was a very, very good day! 

Paonta Sahib to Thanedar via Chakrata and Kharapathar (286km)

Toyota’s Discover India was another series of road trip destinations within the country that ran in Autocar India for a year. 

For one of these, a friend of mine, Chetan, and I drove from Mumbai to the Himachal Himalaya in a Toyota Corolla, hoping to experience some snow. That seemed to be a pointless exercise because even though it was freezing cold when we stopped for a night in Chakrata in Uttarakhand, there seemed to be no chance of snowing. The next morning, we visited Tiger Falls, located 20km from Chakrata. At the pool below the falls, a sadhu was sitting cross-legged on a rock, wearing a whimsical expression with a faraway and happy look in his eyes. In his hand was a chillum (a short smoking pipe made of clay) with a thin spiral of smoke rising from it. 

Kharapathar looked picturesque at daybreak.

Chetan struck up a conversation with him, telling him about how we had driven all the way from Mumbai, yearning to see snow. Baba Ji sniffed the air deeply as if he were going into pranayama before pointing his bony forefinger to the heavens and proclaiming, “Son, I can smell snow in the air. It will arrive tomorrow!”

There was not a cloud in the sky and Chetan quickly pronounced that Baba Ji was high on something hallucinogenic. That evening, we overnighted at the Giriganga Resort in Kharapathar on the Hatkoti-Theog road. The next morning, I woke up to a white landscape. Incredulously, the Baba Ji had been right. Snow had fallen during the night, and it was still coming down in flurries. For the remainder of that road trip from Kharapathar to Thanedar and Shimla, we had more snow than we had hoped for, and the drive was stunningly beautiful through forests of pine blanketed in pristine fleece. We had found the white winter we had gone looking for.

Mladá Boleslav to Stalag Luft III and back (347km)

In July 2010, Murali Menon, an ex-Autocar India staffer who was then working with Man’s World Magazine, and I were on a Skoda press trip in Mladá Boleslav in the Czech Republic to visit the company’s headquarters and experience its new Yeti SUV.

One afternoon, we were given a Yeti to spend some time with and it was expected that we would explore the area around Prague and Mladá Boleslav, which are 50km apart.

The Skoda Yeti parked near the exit of Tunnel Harry.

But wanting to do something more exciting that afternoon, I looked up Stalag Luft III. This German POW camp was made infamous in Paul Brickhill’s book, The Great Escape, on which the 1963 movie of the same name is based. It was directed by John Sturges and starred Hollywood and English cinema greats of the time, including Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough. 

The story is about how English POWs dug a 28-feet deep and 335-feet-long tunnel called ‘Harry’ to attempt an escape from Stalag Luft III, which stands for Prison for Airmen No. 3.

The Tunnel Harry was sealed by the Germans after the escape attempt in March 1944.

From the book, I knew that Stalag Luft III was in Lower Silesia in a town called Sagan, which was then in Nazi Germany. A quick Wikipedia search revealed that Sagan had been renamed to Zagan and is now in Poland. Wikipedia also yielded GPS coordinates, and feeding those into my Garmin GPS (that ruled before Google Maps took over), we saw that Zagan wasjust 170km away. 

That day, after lunch, we drove through the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland to Zagan, walked around the prison camp, visited the museum and returned to Mladá Boleslav in time for dinner. “It probably would have taken the same time to drive through Andheri, Jogeshwari and Borivali and back,” Murali observed wryly.

The trolleys used to traverse Tunnel Harry can be experienced at the museum at Stalag Luft III.

The camp can still be visited, and it has a replica of the original tunnel that one can experience, complete with a trolley and rails. Flagstones demarcate the actual tunnel’s path, and one can see where it ended – a few feet short of the woods. This miscalculation was one of the reasons why the escape failed. There is also a little museum that houses actual articles from the time. Examples are plates with Nazi Swastikas.

The Great Escape has always been one of my favourite war movies, and to stand where it all played out was truly goosebumps-inducing.

Munsiyari to Vanghat Lodge, Jim Corbett Park (345km)

There is a spectacularly scenic road from Munsiyari to Jauljibi along the Gori Ganga River, whose water is ice blue. The route has hardly any traffic and remains one of my favourites in the Kumaon Himalayas. At Jauljibi, the Gori Ganga meets the Kali River, which flows along India’s border with Nepal. From here, a road going northeast heads up into the Darma Valley. If it wasn’t for the geopolitical barriers, this road could be driven all the way to Mount Kailash in Tibet. 

The first crossing for the video shot with the river at a comfortable level.

However, in January 2021, just as the nation was emerging from the pandemic, I did the drive from Munsiyari to create content with the Ford Endeavour. At Jauljibi, we headed west towards Jim Corbett National Park and stayed at the Vanghat Lodge on the Ramganga River’s banks.

Sensible tourists, arriving in SUVs or sedans, park at the foot of the suspension footbridge across the river and proceed to Vanghat on foot; it is a 30 to 40-minute walk. But cashing in on the opportunity of a poetic PTC, I stood before the Endeavour and announced to the camera, “We don’t need to slog it along the foot trail. We have a Ford, and so, we shall ford the river.”

I then drove across for a video shot and then crossed back. Then, I drove through the river again to shoot some stills to show off on Instagram. In hindsight, I realised I should have just parked the car after that one lap and walked. Instead, I drove to the lodge’s doorstep, a spring in my step from my accomplishments.

However, there was a thunderstorm that night. When we had to leave the next morning, I realised, to my horror, that the water level in the river had noticeably risen.

An overnight thunderstorm caused the Ramganga River to rise considerably.

The python of fear started to uncoil in my stomach as I prepared to drive the Endeavour back across the river. My crew surreptitiously slinked away towards the foot trail. When I called out to them for moral support, they claimed that they’d get some additional action shots from the footbridge as I crossed the river. But I had a strong suspicion that they doubted I’d make it across safe and sound.

It was very scary, no doubt; the water level in the middle of the river was certainly higher than the Endeavour’s air intake, which sits at headlight level. But the Endy got through without a single drop of water getting into the cabin. 

The moment I was out of the water and on high ground, I turned the engine off and checked the air filter. It was considerably wet. I had been very fortunate to get across without the engine going into a hydrostatic lock!

Also see:

300th issue special: Cracking 300kph, 3 times

300th issue special: Famous cars with 300 in the name