It seems like a distant dream, as I sit enclosed in my house during Pandemic, afraid to take public transport. I have been confined to my house since last 8 months, with short trips by car to my sister’s house during week-ends. I love travelling and have been to lot of places, I had plans to explore many more cities during this year, but I digress.
I am happy that I captured some memories on my blog. My MP trip, that I made in November 2019 has been memorable one and I have blogged in 16 parts.
The tour was of 15 days, we travelled a total of 2300kms by road plus 2 days of railway travel. Our tour started from Gwalior and ended at Indore, we covered Jhansi, Orchha, Khajuraho, Bhandavghar, Jabalpur, Pachmarhi, Bhojpur, Bhimbetkar, Sanchi, Bhopal, Ujjain , Omkeshwar, Maheshwar, Mundu, Indore.
After a long night journey in the train-Punjab Mail, we reach Gwalior at 4pm. The tour operators come to receive us from the station and we are to stay at Hotel Landmark. There is lot of excitement, we go to each others room to compare the comfort and we discover that some have good rooms and some are average. Our (I shared room with my friend) room is average.
The day was spent moving from Gwalior to Khajuraho. On our route, we stopped at Jhansi and Orchha. The bus was comfortable but the roads were bad. Most of the roads are being redeveloped, There is construction everywhere to built better roads, some of the cities of MP have plans to become smart cities.
We reached late evening at Khajuraho and checked into the hotel- Khajuraho Temple View. There was a beautiful view of lake outside the hotel and on the other side of the lake were the Khajuraho temples.
After driving all day, we reached Bhandarvagarh late evening. I couldn’t see anything, but a narrow road and thick bushes on either side of the road. It seemed like a ghostly town with not a person in sight. The bus moved slowly over uneven mud road till we reached the beautiful resort called Mogli Resort. We were to stay in the middle of the jungle.
We spend lot of time on road trip all over MP, but bus journey was not boring. I am reminded of the movie ‘Bombay to Goa’ wherein you meet all kinds of people. Some are dozing, some fast asleep, some noisy, some want to sing, some want to eat.
Like every state in India have their own hill station, Madhya Pradesh has its hill station at Panchmarhi at 1067 meters, commonly known as Satpura ki Rani. It has also been recognised as UNESCO biosphere reserve.
On our way to Bhopal, we stopped by at a very interesting site called Bhimbetka. Here you find large rock shelters that have paintings that date back to thousands of years depicting the life of the people through different eras. This has been now declared as UNESCO world heritage site.
On our route towards Bhopal, we stopped at Bhojpur during evening hours. We were here to see the Shiva temple called Bhojeshwar temple. The bus had stopped at quite a distance, and we walked through narrow, broken roads, passing through thatched house where villagers still use dried cow dung as fuel for cooking.
We reached Bhopal late evening and checked into a nice comfortable Raj Bhoj Hotel. Bhopal is the capital city of Madhya Pradesh, known as the city of natural and artificial lakes and is also one of the greenest cities in India.
We drove 46kms away from Bhopal to reach Sanchi stupas that are one of the oldest stone structures in India and important monument of Indian architecture
Any direction you look, all you see are temples. We visited many temples at Ujjain and all were unique in its own way. We were asked to stick to vegetarian diet, so that we could visit all the temples guilt free.
I consider myself blessed that I have been able to visit the sacred island of Omkeshwar that is shaped like as symbol Ohm- the holiest symbol of Hinduism , it has one of the 12 Jyotirlinga shrines of India.
For my women friends, Maheshwar was the most interesting place, you know why? Because women love shopping and they love temples.
MP is full of rich history and ancient architecture. Most of it has been reduced to ruins or is neglected. There are beautiful palaces and nature is abundant, but hardly any tourist. The roads are bad and infrastructure is also poor.
Indore - one of the cleanest city of India, is the last stop of my MP tour. The charm of the city lies in rich cultural heritage preserved over the years.
I used to blog during my trip, at the end of the day on FB but writing on this blog has taken some time, because of many distractions during this year. But I am glad to have completed the series successfully.
