Archive for March 28th, 2011
Drive to India’s Last Railway Station – 1000 Kms in 31 hours
So how do you plan to spend a Sunday, which is just 3 days away from India-Pakistan semi-final?
Though I have no clue about your plans, a friend and I decided to visit India-Pakistan border!!
Now, that was an exaggeration. 
So coming back to realities – Both of us wanted to take a long drive away from the routine life. And for this very reason, we zeroed onto Barmer, Rajasthan].
On a Saturday, we drove around 350 Kms from our starting point to reach Barmer. On checking into a hotel and enquiring about the places to visit in Barmer, the reply which we got was not pleasant at all. To my horror and my friend’s disgust*, the receptionist told that Barmer was no tourist destination and there was nothing to see here.
[* - as it was my idea to drive into the Thar]
Though I had checked it on internet and I very well knew that there was not much here apart from disputed oil fields (Cairn-ONGC-Vedanta fame), I remembered having seen pics of border & railroads closeby. At this juncture, a friend AA, powered by Google ;-) informed that there is a place called Munabao in Barmer, which is very-very close to the border.
With nothing better to visit, we decided to go to Munabao the next day. All we had with us were the following tools –
- A list of towns + map of the state
- My friend’s mini monster*
Journey was totally ‘sand’alacious and full of dust. We just kept on ticking one checkpoint after the other as we passed it.
The only continuous reminder of we being a part of civilization was the railway track, which led to Pakistan.
We eventually did make it to the border. Unluckily, BSF did not ‘officially’ allow photography. But, as usual, there were alternatives…
And finally, the picture that said it all…
You Are At Last Indian Railway Station
As I have already mentioned, the heat was hellish. We did take a temperature-gauge with us and what it told was beyond belief
50 degree Celsius!
And if you see closely, our gauge had been designed to measure temperature upto 50 degrees Celsius only. So I am not sure whether the temperature was exactly 50 degrees or higher…
Being a bit statistically inclined, I realized later that we had driven a total of 1012 Kms in 31 hours! A year back we had done a biking trip to Jaisalmer and had done around 1200 Kms in 72 hours.
So this was one hell of an improvement
As of now, we have another trip being pre-planned. But I better keep it under wraps
