Guntur Road Trip
A couple of weeks ago, we went to the wedding of the daughter of one of Gopal's friends. After a honeymoon trip to Ooty, they were ready to head back to their home in Guntur, some 300km from Hyderabad. Although both of them work for the railways, they were unable to get a railway ticket. Getting tickets can be hard (as we found when we wanted to go to Sikkim in April/May) but especially so at the moment as there are a lot of strikes in Andhra Pradesh at the moment.
One part of Andhra Pradesh (the part around Hyderabad) used to be as separate state called Telangana. Telangana was merged with Andhra State to form Andhra Pradesh in 1956, but there has always been a faction that wants the merger revoked. The government announced in July the start of the process to split the two into separate states, which has prompted a lot of protest from the Andhra parts of the state. Last time this happened (1997), there was so much protest in the Andhra regions that the process was stopped. This time, there is also a lot of protest from the Samaikyandhra movement, who want Andhra Pradesh to stay as it is now. One aspect of this is that all the bus drivers are on strike, and so there are no buses at all from Hyderabad to Guntur available right now.
We left home at 5:30am, to go pick up the bride and groom and the bride's mother, who was coming with us for the round-trip. After driving to their place, loading up and having breakfast, we got on the road just after 7am. The trip down was fairly uneventful. It being Sunday, early morning and without the RTC buses running, there was little traffic.
What traffic there was can be a little annoying though. One of my first observations when I arrived in India is that while roads here look exactly like roads everywhere else, the painted lines here are treated as purely decorative by most drivers. For most of the trip, we were on a four lane dual carriageway, two lanes each way separated by a wide median. Many drivers would sit their car right in the middle, straddling the line that divided the two lanes and meaning that it isn't really possible for anyone to get past them. Even if you can squeeze past, it is dangerous, since they don't ever look in the rearview mirror (and many of them drive with their outside mirrors either removed or folded in), and they can easily swerve into you without warning (they almost never indicate). You have to come up behind them and honk the horn until they move to one side to get past. They also have a tendency to suddenly brake or swerve for no apparent reason. If they are in the right hand lane and are approaching a car stopped on the left median, they will suddenly brake, even though there is a full empty lane between them and the car. You have to be very alert to drive here.
The highways we were driving on were largely pretty good, although there were several places where suddenly the two lanes we were driving on turned into a single carriageway and there was suddenly oncoming traffic. The road quality was a lot lot lower, and we had to wind through some villages, so that slowed things down somewhat. Fortunately, the road back was almost all highways, as for some reason, those towns had bypasses in only one direction.
Our route took us through Vijayawada, which is the third biggest city in Andhra Pradesh. Fairly small by Indian standards, it has the same population as Auckland. There we crossed the Krishna river on a bridge that is more than 1km long. Since we had to get there and back in only a day, this was a business trip and there was no time to stop and take scenery photos. You'll just have to take my word that it was a beautiful view :-)
Guntur itself was a lovely town, although the effects of the Samaikyandhra strikes were evident. Many shops and restaurants were closed. The bride and groom told us that a few weeks before the wedding it was so bad that you could hardly buy food because all the vendors were on strike. Restaurants would be closed during the day, but some would open at night. However, you couldn't get cash from ATMs because all the staff who would refill them were on strike. He had to get a relative to post him some money hidden inside a book so they could buy food. It doesn't seem like a particularly effective form of protest to me, since the people it affects are the people who live in the Andhra region and probably already support the cause. The politicians in Hyderabad who are agitating for the separation aren't the least bit affected.
Guntur was a lot hotter than I had anticipated. Here in Hyderabad, because we are over 500m elevation, it is relatively cooler. It doesn't go below about 22 and doesn't go higher than about 30, and there is a lot of cloud and frequent showers to cool things down. Despite the showers, the fact that is is a semi-arid desert environment means the humidity is not really very high. In Guntur however, much closer to sea level, it was a hot sunny day, well over 30 degrees and very humid. I though summer here was bad, with temps up to 45 degrees. There, they have the same temperatures, but with high humidity to go along with it. And add to that the fact that they can have two 6-hour power cuts a day (vs our 1-2 hour cuts) and it makes summer there quite unbearable.
Anyone who has driven long distance in New Zealand knows that you get bugs splatted on the windscreen. I feel sorry when it's a bee, but quite happy if it is a wasp or hornet (other then the mess). Here, though it is dragonflies. We flew through swarms of them, and probably took out at least a dozen. It feels much worse because they are so huge - the bodies are nearly 5cm long.
On the way home in the evening, we encountered many more four-legged obstacles. Lots of small herds of buffalo, cows and goats are taken to graze along the roadsides during the day, and then are taken back home for milking in the evening. They just trudge back along the highways at their own pace. Their handlers can sometimes induce them to bunch up or move in a certain way, but for the most part, a big buffalo goes where it wants to. So we often had to stop or slow down to wait for animals to move out of the way.
In all, it was about 9 hours of driving in two solid stretches. The only breaks in the driving were thanks to the car. But the one thing I can say about the car is that it is very comfortable. 9 hours in an airplane seat is no picnic, but Fiat seats are much more comfortable than that. I think we should be fine once we get started on the very long distances.