Every year going to hometown on Diwali is a task in itself, as you need to plan 3-4 months prior if you are going via train else you won’t get tickets same with flight but there you will get tickets but as it’s main holiday time in India the pries are sky high.
This year we moved back to Mumbai after some 4.5-5 years, so we decided to drive to our hometown Ajmer which is around 1035 Km. This time we didn’t do much of planning of route or place to stop on the way or place to stay in Udaipur.
We have done the booking 2 weeks before we were supposed to leave as we were in confusion that should we visit Udaipur on our return journey or while going to Ajmer. Hotel prices played a major role in finalizing this.
We stayed in Ramada Resort & Spa, the price of same room after Diwali was equal to the price we got before Diwali only the difference was in the same price, we booked it for 2 nights before Diwali ?. Lesson learned is always check the prices before and after any major holiday and what destination you are planning to visit. If you want to save some money, then adjust your holidays accordingly.
There is this straight rout to Udaipur which is the shortest which is –
Mumbai – Vapi – Surat – Bharuch – Vadodara – Godhra – Modasa – Rishabhdev – Udaipur
Other routs are little longer in terms of distance and time. Till Vadodara it’s national highway and after that it’s state highway but in good shape. Full rout is mix of 4 & 6 lanes, but on state highway the traffic is little more. After Rishabhdev till Udaipur it’s again national highway.
This was the first time we were driving this long in a single day. Previously I had driven 500 km i.e. Bangalore to Belgaum for our Bangalore to Mumbai road trip.
If you want to take Ahmedabad rout then you will go via Himatnagar which will meet again at Rishabhdev and from one of our friends who stays in Ahmedabad that Himatnagar rout is not that good, not sure about the reason.
If you have read our previous travel blogs, then you might be knowing that we prefer day driving and we leave our house early morning. This time also we did the same we left from our home at around 5.20 AM, but this was first time we were driving from Mumbai were not aware of traffic jam on Ghodbunder road due to a small ‘Ghat’ section.
As it’s a ghat and fully loaded truck are there on the road, they climb the road very slowly due to which there was a 30 min congestion . Literally we were at same place w/o moving a bit for 5-10 min in that congestion.
Finally, after 30-40 min we were out of that horrible traffic we have witnessed till date that early in a day.
As we must cover more than 700 km in a day, we didn’t make too many stops throughout the journey. I think max we made 4 stops including b/f and lunch. Due to this we covered the lost time in the congestion, we covered around 1 hr and reached Udaipur around 8.15 PM which was around 16 hr for 768 Km distance.
Overall toll paid for that day was Rs 495 as on state highway in Gujrat cars are exempted, but in Rajasthan they have again implemented it(before there also we don’t have to pay for car on state highways). Total diesel consumed was one full tank i.e. around 40-42 ltr Rs 2750.
We know that we will reach Udaipur late in the evening so didn’t book Ramada for this night instead we saved few bucks by booking a reasonably good homestay in the main city. We have booked Aloukik homestay. It has very good reviews on all the sites and it was quite cheap, so we booked it. It costs us Rs 1600 around including b/f.
Check in was Ok and didn’t take much time, room was also good and specious, bed was comfortable.
We were not happy with few things which are –
- One of the staff members was not able to understand even in Hindi.
- We asked for 4 aloo parathas with poha and tea for b/f and staff member said will be done, but in morning at bf time they said they will only give 2 parathas and for rest we must pay. This is something we didn’t understand as in our previous experience at homestays we didn’t face such thing.
- Lastly when we were about to check out, they owner lady asked us to pay Rs 60 for the tea we have a night before as if we were leaving w/o paying her. We said that all our stuff is still in room and we have not checked out yet and we had small argument on it.
Stay tuned for more updates on our journey, Next blog coming soon.