Road Runners
Aninda Sardar
I first saw Elina and Gaurav and their white Thar in Tawang. At first I assumed that the white Thar with the Mumbai registration number, in the parking lot of Vivanta by Taj probably belonged to some officer of the Armed Forces. At breakfast though, I heard this couple at the next table talking about their journey back towards Dirang. There was some political unrest and they wanted to know if it would be okay to head back. Considering that there wasn’t anyone other than them and us at breakfast, we started talking, as nervous travellers often do, and then the penny dropped. The white Thar with the Mumbai registration belonged to these two adventurous enthu-cutlets.
If you met Mumbai based Elina Kujur and Gaurav Dabas you would peg them as a regular office-going couple. “Both of us work in the corporate sector, you know,
like everybody else, we go to office, we come back,” Elina says.
They are classic DINKs with a common passion for road trips. Very long road trips. Mostly to the mountains. “Gaurav is a motorcycle riding enthusiast and has of course ridden in most of the Himalayas, excepting Nepal and Bhutan. But I find no joy in it. We did one bike trip in Kashmir’s Gurez valley and I didn’t like it much. That’s when the whole idea of driving came along,” admits Elina.
The first trip they did was from Mumbai to Leh but via Jamnagar and Bhatinda.
Their entry point was Kashmir through Zoji La and not the usual Himachal.
From that beginning, their Thar has clocked over 50,000 kilometres in just over two years of ownership.
The engineer-MBA duo who met at office were lucky too because a lot of their romance bloomed over talk of road trips. Road trip rivalry in fact. “Most of our conversations used to be about who has been to more places,” she tells me.
A healthy competitive streak that has only helped cement their common love for long road trips. In fact, at the foundation of Elina and Gaurav’s relationship was a road trip that Elina was planning at the time.
“Funny story. Even when we met the first time, it all started with planning a trip. Our first conversation was when I was planning to go and drive in Norway. So, when I was planning the trip he helped me through it,” she remembers with a smile. Their first trip together was when they went to Arunachal’s famous Ziro music festival. Since that tentative foray there has been no looking back. These days they scour every available news resource to find out what’s the next new addition to India’s highway network. Simply so that they can plan the next big trip.
At this point, I swing around and ask the question I had been meaning to all along. Why choose a Thar? “When this new Thar came out, I think in 2012 or 2013, I’m not sure, I would always tell my dad that I want this. He would ask me why I didn’t want a sedan or a hatchback. I don’t know why, but I have always liked vehicles such as these. I used to live in Powai (Mumbai) sometime ago and my neighbour bought a red Thar that I used to eye. Plus, I learnt to drive in my father’s Scorpio,” she explains. Not exactly the logical sequence of why the Thar suited what she wanted from life, which is what I had expected, but a more inexplicable emotional reason. Perhaps, that’s the beauty of the Thar. Far more than luring the owner with its offer of all the kit that a road trip crazy person would need, it makes her feel.
Back to the trips and the wanderlust, Elina tells me that the travel bug bit her very early on in life. “I used to look at maps. I love maps. I would look at Instagram and see places and take notes.” Gaurav however is more technical in his approach to travel and feels excited about the prospect of getting the vehicle ready and ensuring that it’s in perfect nick. Although their approach to travel isn’t identical, there is a shared love of the country – India, that also binds them together.
“I think we have a very big love for India itself. Right. Like, honestly, we have been planning a lot of tours abroad. But whenever we plan, you know, it all comes down to how much money we’re willing to spend.”
So how many trips have they done in the little-more-than-two-years they have had the Thar? “Eight or nine. And each of our trips is like more than 3,000km,” she says matter-of-factly. That’s an average of four holidays a year! That’s not including the smaller ones like the trip they did exploring coastal Maharashtra. How do they manage leaves, I ask.
“The biggest thing we do is we don’t take a lot of leaves. Both of us are disciplined individuals and we plan. Like right now we’re planning for Manang, in September. Five months ahead of our trip we are planning routes, budgets and leaves. We are figuring out how to save enough leave days for us to be able to travel. Often people avoid talking to their managers until the last minute. We do the opposite. So, we can plan our work and finish everything before we go on leave and everybody is aligned,” she explains. Sound reasoning, if you ask me. Prepping for a trip also includes servicing their Thar, which they do both before and after, simply because of the number of kilometres they do and the peace of mind it adds. They also don’t believe in stopping too much and never start very early. “We always have a good heavy breakfast before we start,” Elina says. They also don’t overpack and over prepare. With experience they have learnt that a steady speed is better than going as fast as possible. Pace over speed.
By the time we call it quits and hang up, we have talked about three-quarters of an hour. And in that time, I guess Elina managed to trigger something deep inside. That old desire to head out again perhaps. Why else am I on Google Maps right now, looking for road trip destinations?
