With darkness setting in, the Santa Fe’s bright, potent projectors cast their radiant beams wide, covering not just the road but the kerb as well. Distance-wise, I wish it cast its glow slightly further ahead, but the powerful high beam made up for this shortcoming. The roads had flattened out for a bit, but that was only a brief respite before we continued our ongoing affair with winding roads. Back to navigating around a pot-pourri of hairpins and sharp banks for us then, with traffic hurtling down from the opposite direction, and no street lights to guide us either. Everybody gave the Santa Fe a wide berth, though, as they should. After all, what other choice do you have when you see this huge SUV gaining on you, a fierce growl emitting from its exhaust pipes?
By the time the road started to level out a little and the blinking of distant lights got steadily brighter, the temperature had suddenly dropped. The Santa Fe’s automatic climate control was in full swing, providing a warm, toasty atmosphere within the cabin that had me feeling cosy and beginning to long for a soft bed for the night. Outside, the air carried the slightest scent of eucalyptus, another sign that Ooty was but a stone’s throw away. After the local cops had stopped us just outside the city limits and checked if we were laundering money (‘what to do, sir, election time…’) we eventually made it to The Greenery Ooty Holiday Inn, which was our rest stop for the night. The first leg of or journey had come to an end, and as I stood at the hotel’s front porch looking down on the starlight reflecting off the roof of our car, I knew deep down that it wasn’t half as bad as it could have been if we had been any other car rather than the Santa Fe.
