Our idea of a relaxing and luxurious holiday reached fruition with the City of Lakes as the destination in the fabulous Audi A8
AFTER SPENDING MOST of the year on the road travelling across the globe in connection with work, it was time to take a break and spend some quality time with my family.
The idea was to have a relaxing and luxurious holiday. After consulting my good friend, Bob Rupani, I zeroed in on Fateh Garh in Udaipur, the city of lakes, and the
Dungarpur Palace on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border.
The next step was the mode of transport and the option was either fly p there and back or drive down and this would depend entirely upon the car that I could lay my hands on. After a couple of calls the good folk at Audi said that they would let me have the car for the drive and I was surprised when the A8 4.2 TDI rolled into the parking lot as I was expecting something like a Q5 or an A6 and certainly not the top-of-the-line A8.
We had planned to leave at about 4.00 am since I wanted to pass through Thane early to avoid the local traffic. I prefer to drive at night, because at that time I don’t have to negotiate through the local two- wheelers and three-wheelers on the highway. To do a night drive you need a good set of headlights and the A8 probably has the best in the business. After tossing and turning in bed as I just could not sleep, we decided to leave and it was 2.00 am. Before we set course, I set the suspension on the ‘comfort’ mode and raised the ride height and loaded the CD changer. We were ready to roll and within 20 minutes we were on the Pune-Mumbai expressway as there was hardly any traffic at that time of the night. In a little over two hours we had gone through Thane and were on the Gujarat highway. At the rate of knots we were travelling, signboards were whizzing past regularly, but we could not keep a track of the towns being left behind as it was difficult to read due to the sheer speed at which we were
motoring along.
Once you are on the highway, you realise that the V8 4.2 TDI is just the perfect car for long-distance driving with the engine just about rolling over at 1,500 revs in the eighth gear and cruising at 160 km/h, which is just unbelievable; most cars would be struggling to do more than 80 km/h at 1,500 revolutions per minute and at 2,000 you are motoring along at 175 km/h.
It was about 8.30 in the morning when we reached Vadodara and by 10.00 am we had bypassed Ahmedabad and were heading north towards Udaipur. It was one o’clock in the afternoon when I pulled into Fateh Garh after being on the road for exactly 11 hours and 900 kilometres. We had reached our destination. Fateh Garh is located about seven kilometres west of Udaipur and stands 350 feet above the city, overlooking the city, Lake Pichola and the City Palace.
If you are going to spend 10 to 11 hours in the car then the A8 cabin is where you would want to be. Its large seats are very comfortable and give you good support in all the right places and you can adjust them exactly to your body size with just the correct amount of lumbar support for your lower back. You can also get a massage while you are driving. I found the massage very relaxing during this long stint in the car. Listening to the three tenors on the Bang 
and Olufsen music system was like hearing them live at a concert as the placement of the speakers and the cabin acoustics are fantastic. The reason why the sound system sounds good is also because the cabin is very quiet. No road, tyre or wind noise creeps into the cabin and this goes a long way in helping the quality of the sound system. 
There are a lot of driver aids to make life easy, such as the automatic headlamp dipper, which, when the car detects oncoming lights, automatically dips its headlights to low beam and back to high once you have passed the oncoming car. These small things go a long way to make your drive easier, less stressful and more comfortable.
After checking in and resting for a couple of hours the evening tea was served on the terrace overlooking the Sajan Ghard Palace. You have the option of having dinner indoors or next to the swimming pool with the stunning view of the fully lit up City Place. The ambience and the atmosphere is just great and to top that it was the largest moon of the year that evening. The lal mas and the roast chicken was really tasty and the whole dining experience was something that one would cherish for a long time.
In the morning Jitender Singh, the owner of Fateh Garh who lives on the property and looks after the day-to-day running of the hotel, explained how they had harnessed a lot of natural resources like windmill for electricity and solar heaters and were recycling water and other waste to keep their power bills down. The Fateh Garh property has 44 rooms and they are well furbished and very comfortable. The location is just perfect as you are not far from the city. At the same time it is very quiet and peaceful.
There is a lot to see in Udaipur and I started the morning by driving up to Sajan Ghar (also known as the Monsoon Place) and after visiting the Place we decided to go for lunch to the garden restaurant for an authentic Rajasthani thali. I fed the address into the GPS navigation system and this routed us through the old part of the city and some 
very narrow lanes that were marginally wider then the A8 itself and chock-a-block with traffic. I managed to drive the car through without a scratch. After a sumptuous lunch it was down to the City Place for the sunset boat ride on Lake Pichola that takes you to the Jal Mahal. This boat ride is highly recommended. After spending a day going around the city of Udaipur it was time to head back to Fateh Garh for a nice meal in the moonlight. The one thing that 
struck me was that apart from the staff I was the only Indian there. It is really sad to see that most of us prefer to travel abroad for a holiday when we have such beautiful places and excellent hospitality.
It was time to bid adieu to Udaipur as we headed to our second destination, Udai Bilas Palace in Dungarpur, 110 kilometres from Udaipur towards Ahmedabad. It felt like just going round the corner after having driven 900 kilometres a couple of days ago.
We reached Dungarpur about 12.00 noon, well in time for lunch on the lake front. The food was quite exquisite. After lunch I walked around the Udai Bilas Palace with Harshvardhan Singh, the Yuvraj of Dungarpur. He showed me round his garage, which has a good collection of cars and motorcycles. He is in the process of building an AC Cobra kit car with a BMW drivetrain. The evening tea was served by the poolside and you can enjoy birdwatching as you get all the migratory birds coming in and make the lake their home for the winter. For bird watchers it
is just the place as you can sit on the Palace lawns, sip your tea and watch exotic birds.
Evening drinks were in the part of the garage which the Yuvraj has converted into a bar with automobile memorabilia 
collected over decades. This shows that Yuvraj Harshvardhan is a true car guy. We were treated like royalty as
Yuvraj and his wife joined us for dinner and they were really warm and friendly and made us feel like one of them. The rooms have been kept as original as possible and when you live in one of them, you can experience the lifestyle of the Kings.
There are two palaces in Dungarpur: the old Palace has the largest and one of the most exotic collections of paintings in Asia, the second Palace, where the Royal family stays, has a part of it converted into a hotel with 23 rooms. This is a highly recommended destination (www.udaibilaspalace.com).
Three days of relaxation and it was time to hit the road again. It was a Saturday and I wanted to cross Thane about two in the afternoon. For this to be possible I had to leave Dungarpur at six in the morning. After starting on the dot of six we were in Vadodara in three hours and headed towards Thane and there were a lot of small cars, two- and 
three-wheelers compared to what we had encountered on our outward journey. Everybody says that the A8 is a big car and difficult to handle, but I was throwing it around like a small hatch and passing traffic as if they were at a 
standstill. The reason why the A8 4.2 TDI is so effortless to drive is that all you need is a little pressure on the throttle pedal and it surges forward and a little push on the brake pedal stops the car in its tracks. With so much 
performance at hand, the car is never stressed and if the car is not stressed, then the driver is not stressed. In fact, he can relax while driving.
As I had planed, we reached Thane exactly at two in the afternoon and it took us more then half-an-hour to cross Thane and we were back in Pune at 4.30 pm. The A8 is a great long-distance car. It just gobbles up the miles
effortlessly. It returned 10 km/l over this 2,500-km round trip.
Actually, this was a personal holiday and the reason I penned this drive so that people who buy these lovely cars enjoy them rather than fly to their destination and then drive around in a cab. Today the roads in India have come a long way as most of them have six lanes or a minimum of four-lane dual carriageways.
Story & Photography: Aspi Bhathena
