Anantapur Trip

We were planning to attend Dhananjay’s wedding at Anantapur, which is nearly 200km from Bangalore. After exploring all the travel options, we decided to take our car. One of the main reasons for this was, Anantapur falls on the Bangalore-Hyderabad highway, NH-7 and this stretch of the road was supposed to be really good. Anyways, the decision was made, and we (Me, My wife, Gopi and Praveen) started off from our office in Marathalli at around 3:45pm. As we hoped, the NH7 highway was pretty good, and it was a really cool drive. The only problem was the heat, as it was the beginning of April and was getting into the peak summer zone. We had to bear with the heat untill around 6pm, and after that it was fine. We reached Anantapur by 8pm. I was a bit nervous for the last one hour of our journey, as it was dark and I was driving on the highway. After some calling and searching around, we finally reached the marraige hall by 8:30pm, thanks to the directions of Gopi, who was a localite there for several of his schooling/college years.

We were planning to visit Lepakshi Nandi temple the next day. Its a deviation of about 60km from the route back to Bangalore. But, unfortunately, there was a state wide bandh call on that day, and there were incidents of road blockage. We just couldn’t go anywhere untill afternoon. We attended the wedding in the morning and just stayed back in the Hotel. As Gopi, was not joining us for the return journey, we were even more scared of getting stuck. Finally, we started our return journey at 3pm, after taking a properly sketched road map of getting on to the highway from Gopi. Instead of Gopi, Anil joined us in the return journey. Anil had come along with Adi and others by an overnight bus. It seems, they had arrived in Anantapur around 4 in the morning, and they had some hard time getting the Hotel room. Adi and others, were unlucky even for their return journey, as there were no buses untill 6pm, thanks to the bandh.

We loaded the car with some snacks and water bottles, thanks to the scortching summer heat. Even that couldn’t give us much respite, and we almost drove the whole journey with AC on. And Santro, with AC on, obviously didn’t give us that much speed and pickup. So, it took slightly more time to reach Bangalore, than we expected. We managed to reach Anil’s place by 7:30pm, without taking any breaks in between the journey, owing to my fear of driving on highways at night. We were lucky to get through quickly, even though there was a lot of office traffic, after entering Bangalore.

Overall, it was a nice trip. Had there been no Bandh, we could have enjoyed the trip even better