Mumbai to Thrissur by Bus

Yes, road travel is so much more comfortable these days. I really travelled from Mumbai to Thrissur by bus, albeit it was not a non-stop journey. It was peppered with halts at Bangalore, Mysore, Coimbatore and Palakkad. Yet, the ways roads have developed over the last decade, it is a feasible option. There is a rider - in God's own country's,  roads, like many other things, seem to be stagnated in Indira's India. You can still experience narrow and pot-holed national highways there, heritage structures which are endangered across most other parts of the country I have travelled to. To be fair, the state highways in Kerala are good. 

If you had to travel from Mumbai to Bangalore only a few years back, then a comfortable journey could be assured only with advance booking of train tickets. Now, the roads are broad and well maintained and the buses that ply the Mumbai-Bangalore route are just as comfortable as travelling in AC 3-tier class. And more time efficient. The Indian Railways have a funny sense of punctuality. If you can't run your trains on schedule, keep enough buffer in the schedules that it will be very difficult for the trains to be late even if the driver decides to doze off for a couple of hours. So, it is not surprising for trains on the Indian Railways network to be late by a hour at one station and then subsequently reach an hour ahead of schedule at some station down the route. 

Of course, all this comes at a cost. I didn't count, but there were quite a numer of toll booths along the road from Mumbai to Bangalore. The toll would form a significant component of the bus fare. The Build-Operate-Transfer ventures give the road contractors enough incentive to complete road projects on time and start milking the revenues. And the politicians have a very lucrative business to enter - owning the rights to charge on a major road is a near monopoly business. And satisfied travellers? In Kerala, as long as money flows in from the Gulf, the idea of a toll road is unthinkable. The very mention would lead to strikes the next day. The result is that the roads are in such a patheic state that private buses refused to ply for a few days on the national highway between Palakkad and Thrissur. It was literally a maze of pot holes masquerading as a road. No exaggeration! On the way back from Thrissur to Palakkad, I decided not go back the same way and preferred an alternative route via a state highway.

Local transport is also improving too. BEST in Mumbai is as efficient as ever, but Bangalore's public transport also rivals that of Mumbai today. In the mobile world, Google Maps, Nokia HERE Transit, the BMTC and BEST websites provide an easy way to good routes and schedules for these large cities. Pune was notorious for its inefficient public transport. I rarely travel in Pune these days, so I don't know if the coverage and quality has improved but there surely seem to be more PMPML buses on the roads. In terms of connectivity in rural areas, the transport networks are much better in Kerala and have been so for many years (atleast in the Palakkad and Thrissur districts that I know of). You can travel very easily between different villages at a reasonable price and with reasonable wait times. The one downside is the drivers drive very fast on narrow, higly curvaceous roads and if you don't get a place to sit, you are in for a gym workout. One point to be noted is that private buses run on most of these transport networks. I wouldn't accuse the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation of such efficiency! The less said about the Maharashtra State Transport Corporation the better. Its bus terminuses are pathetic and the bus fleet poorly maintained (except for the Shivneri A/C service). It is a nauseating experience to travel in one of those red buses that the MSRTC runs. In contrast, the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses are much better. I had a comfortable 5 hour journey in a bus of the same class the KSRTC operates between Mysore and Coimbatore, a route that has includes a 27 hairpin ghat in the Satymangalam forests. And the bus stand I saw at Chamarajanagar, a town of 77000 people, would put any bus stand in Mumbai to shame. 

The Mysore-Bangalore leg of the journey was the most exciting. Travelling in an A/C bus is boring, but in a normal bus the wind blowing onto your face and the sun beating down on you makes you feel that you are really experiencing the place you are travelling. The lush green fields irrigated by the Krishna Raja Sagar dam in Mysore district give way to the somewhat drier landscapes of the Chamarajanagar district. Villages pass by, you see people, billboards, etc. something you never see when you travel by train. The bus makes its way to the forest checkpost before entering the Satyamangalam forests. I have the best tomato rice I have ever tasted at a small hotel at the checkpoint. I guess it is because there was a local flavour to the food. Otherwise, in Mumbai, Bangalore, Mysore and many cities the food tastes almost the same. Except of course, I learnt the 'Mysore Masala' that is dished out is totally different from what you get in Mysore. The best part of the journey is the drive through the Satyamangalam forests, which are in the Western Ghats, where you see trees along mountain slopes that stand in gravity defying postures because their roots entrench themselves in myraid ways on the slopes. The Ghats are nerve-wrecking, 27 sharp hairpin curves that follow each other, and you see the debris of a couple of vehicles that have overturned recently while negotiating these turns.