On way to Mangalore – NH48

We celebrated our last christmas and new years on north india tour – visiting places like Delhi, Dehradun. Binsar, Naintial, Mussoruie and Lucknow

This year, I could not get the week off to go very far, but instead I took 2 days off and combined it with the christmas holidays to go on a west Karanataka tour. Our plan was to start visiting places from Mangalore towards Karwar – whatever is possible and then come back to Bangalore.

Mangalore is around 350 kms from Bangalore on the NH48 highway. We have to drive via Neelmangla, CR Patna, Hassan, Sakhleshpur to reach Mangalore.

In order to avoid traffic at Tumkur junction on NH4, we left from our house by 7.30 –which was actually late, as per our normal standards. However, by our luck, we did not get too much traffic. Reaching Neelmangla was a achievement in itself. The road from Bangalore to Neelmangla is very bad, the metro, overbridge counstructions has taken up all the space leaving only one lane for the outwards traffic. We took almost an hour to go 20 kms from bangalore. However, once you cross Neelmangla, the road becomes smooth – not wider, but smoother. The traffic is also less if you leave early and you can cover around 50 kms in an hour. We had last gone via this same road while travelling to Chikmangalur, and the road was being consructed at that time. There was only one lane that was functional, and all vehicles were in that lane itself. We had assumed that since it is more than 6 months, the road would have been constructed by now. But whola!! We were amazed that our government/ corporation/ national highway commission is still constructing the road, and there is no improvement whatsoever. We were talking about how bad the road was – smooth but very narrow. And we had no idea what was in store for us ahead.

You can see Café coffee day on the highway and can stop over to refresh yourself and have a cup of coffee and breakfast. After all,”a lot can happen over a coffee”. J

Once you cross CRPatna, the road becomes wider and is really good till Hassan. From Hassan there is a turn to Chikmangalur and another goes on towards Mangalore. There are boards which mention the information about the turns at various intervals.

We travelled non stop from Hassan to Sakleshpur.  From Sakleshpur to Mangalore, the national highway authority has decided to test everybody’s driving skills by giving the best test that they can give to the drivers – how humans would need to drive if they go and live in a colony on the moon. The NH48 highway has huge “craters” on the “road”!!

My in-laws live in a remote village on the outskirts of Jharkhand border, and I still remember my first visit on the NH7 highway from Kharagpur to Zharkhand. There was a 10 km patch on the highway, which almost did not have any road at all. The village had better roads than that road patch.  The speed limit of the car had to be in between 0 and 20 in order to cross that highway patch. I was amazed at how a national highway can be in such a condition, however small km patch it may be,. This time, when I had the chance to go on the NH7 again, the entire road from Kharagpur to our village was in a very good condition. Today, when I saw the NH48 road to Mangalore, I remembered that visit to Jharkhand. Whenever, I mention Jharkhand, people think it is so very remote and inaccessible – today I felt like telling all those people – Jharkhand is better accessible than Karnataka’s “city” Mangalore. On this NH48 highway, not 2, nor 10 – entire road from Sakhaleshpur to Mangalore is in a bad state – which is about 100 or so kms. The ghats are the best among these – the best patch of road in the ghat is one where the car’s tires can rest on tar road and the body is suspended over the road pit. Almost everywhere else, the pits are so huge that they can goble up a Maruti Alto. We could see the Volvo busses, passing by us, with an amazing suspension but the bus wobbling like a child on the road.  We took around 2 hours to cover almost 30 kms in the ghats. In ghats, we did get some concrete roads, but it was like giving a toffee to a kid and then taking it away as soon as he tries to eat it. We travel on concrete road for 100 meters when it suddenly dips down to a normal “tar” road. Somehow, after a long drive we finally reached Mangalore at about 4.30 pm.

If you have plans to come to Mangalore by car, do have lunch at or before Sakhleshpur, since once you cross Sakhlespur, you would not see any proper restaurants and would have to wait till Mangalore to eat something like we had to do.

We searched for CCD again in Mangalore and had burgers and coffee here. Since, we did not have any reservations, we called up some hotels and checked if they had any rooms available. Once we had confirmed this, we checked with the locals about which beach we can go to watch the sunset. They mentioned Panambur beach and gave very lousy directions, making us go in a circle after which we came to know that we had to go in the opposite direction from where we had started. After a lot more directions from different people, we finally reached the beach. Though we had missed the sunset, there was still light and the beach was worth a visit.  

Panambur beach is around 8 – 10 kms from the main city towards Uddpi. The beach is very clean and has a proper coast guard who whistles on seeing people going deeper in the waters. It was a high tide and the waves were looking really good. I was too tired to get wet in the water, and we just wet our feet in the waves.

We left the beach at about 7 and came back to Mangalore city to check in into our hotel – Poonja International. The hospitality of the hotel is not that good, making customers (not just us, we saw people before us also) wait while they take their own sweet time to check in and fill good knows how many forms and all. Once we were checked in, we had a quick bath and some snacks. Supratim started watching his match (IN – SL ODI) and I sat down to complete my first day travelogue, of a long weekend.