Unexpected

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One fine evening you take an abrupt decision to leave for Jaipur after a short vacation in Delhi. It is just past 7, you reach Dhaula Kuan bus stand are annoyed by the regular polluted and dull evening environment, and suddenly good things begin happening.

After waiting for some time a Rajasthan roadways bus arrives, though you prefer Haryana ones not for quality of service but the excellent and speedy driving style. There are no passengers onboard the bus and you board it with few others. It soon starts rolling on Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway and you forget everything and start enjoying the state-of-the-art infrastructure available and being developed alongside this stretch. You witness a long concrete ribbon across the horizon complete with dazzling crystal streetlights. Flowing streams of red and yellow lights of four wheelers pacing up and down the highway. A little further and you see the IGI tarmac, and if you are lucky you might see a touchdown. Its fun to checkout a 24 something lane wide and about half a kilometre long bumper to bumper traffic jam, given that you are travelling in opposite direction, at Asia’s largest toll plaza! Once inside Gurgaon, you experience one of the most extreme commercial landscape available in Indian sub-continent with multi-national giants jostling to show there corporate might by means of glass, concrete, steel and lightings used to extensive scales. Think of an MNC and you find its office there!

Cross this fancy showcase you find regular crude Indian industrial landscape with isolated traces of organized construction, this soon gives into traditional rural terrain followed by vast wildernesses having industrial and agricultural developments. You might get bored in this scenario, a movie on laptop, a few calls or SMSs may be good time-passers.

Night draws dark and bus is nearing Jaipur. For the first time driver doesn’t takes bypass and sticks to NH-8, which passes through city of Amer and you are lucky enough to catch views of Amer and Jaigarh forts under bright moonlight, increasing there glory manifold. Drivers manoeuvres the bus well along the narrow, hilly stretches of roads. You for the first time observe an Air Force Station on outskirts of Jaipur. Beautiful scenes of forts illuminated up above some hills and Lake Palace, before breaking into the Pink City region, which is surprisingly still abuzz with activity at around 12:45 in night, probably because of some festivity. Its nice to find a tastefully modified swift parked at Badi Chauper just beside Hawa Mahal.

You soon de-board at Sindhi Camp and wonder why journeys should be unplanned and somewhat unconscious too!