Pass with caution!

Okay so one of last task left for Desert Storm ‘09 was to make road book for the fist stage of the rally (Its strange that the nearest stages get done the last) So Sunday 3rd January saw us somewhat 3/4th of the way to Jaipur amongst outcrops of aravalli hills. We had driven the late evening the previous day to Behror, midway to Jaipur, so that we escape th early morning heavy fog. And it was a good decision. Early in the day here we are ready to do this river bed run with temperature showing very bracing 5degree we could only be thankful that there was no breeze and warm sun was out.

The track is almost running parallel to the NH8 and towards the end youcan cross under the NH8 hearing all the heavy traffic thundering overhead on the bridge. After a while the sandy river bed became full of elephant grass(?) and while driving through you got the feeling as if you are cut off from the world. It was almost as if you are driving deep within a wild life sanctuary, say Crobett. The wild life part is not really that far fetched as this area is home to many panthers and as a local informed us just a couple weeks back one of the wild cat was trapped inside a hut and taken in to custody by the wild life department.

Apart from panthers the area is also full of neelgai, wild boars and foxes. Driving through this area was very interesting and at one point we had almost felt the need to engage the diff lock. Now we came to a patch of where the river was still flowing (although more like a drain and not much deep) and it was irresistible not to splash through and capture the same for memories. The track kept on crossing the water a few times and we had a blast.

The odo crossed 75k on return and fortunately there was no fog either till Delhi and surprisingly no traffic jams. The trip was also father-son bonding time and he drove most of the way up and down while I did the ardorus task of making the road book and refrain from doing back seat driving.