In our second web log of the Border2Border drive with the Maruti Suzuki Alto K10, we head from New to the city of Kanpur but not before a quick pit stop in Agra
Story: Aninda Sardar
Photography: Aditya Dhiwar
If you intend to travel by road from Amritsar to New Delhi, it’s best to start as early in the morning as possible. Unfortunately, with the spectacles of the Wagah Border, the Golden Temple and Jallianwala Bagh still clouding our brains like a happy hangover, we only managed to exit the city past 11 o’clock – a grave error in judgement as we would find out at the end of the day. The road to the national capital is a wide six-lane highway for the most part with elevated corridors over practically every town and village. The 470 odd kilometres that separate New Delhi and Amritsar should rightfully have been covered in quick time. Unfortunately, the road is seldom empty and is plagued by quite a bit of truck traffic. Nonetheless, the distance was covered without fuss, excepting one heart stopping moment when a full grown monitor lizard decided to run across the Alto’s path. I must stop here and say that the Alto’s excellent braking abilities came to the fore at this point since I had stomped down on the brake pedal with all the force I could muster in order to shed the 100 km/h velocity that I was cruising at, at the time.
Negotiating through the heavy traffic and stopping multiple times for random breaks (once to see a faint hint of a rainbow as if we had never seen one before) by the time we reached the outskirts of Panipat progress had slowed down to something just better than crawling since all the trucks wanted to pull over to the side of the road and stop to wait it out till restrictions on their entry into the national capital ended. The Alto K10 somehow zip-zapped through all that traffic to get us to the hotel just before midnight.
