SAFARI STORME TO RAJASTHAN
Four days of pedal to the metal, in a Safari Storme
The desert like we have never seen before
IIT’S NOT SOMETHING THAT IS USUALLY SAID about an SUV, but it kind of sums up our epic Rajasthan road trip. I’m yet to check the firewall for a hole in it but I’m sure it'll be fine. The Safari Storme was the first car I reviewed for evo India in December 2015. We drove it for about 50km on the outskirts of Pune for a quick review, almost all of it on road and dropped it off in a few hours. Little did I know that I’ll be clocking over 10,000km in the coming year, a fair bit of it kicking up a storm. Of the huge number of miles I’ve clocked in the Safari Storme, over 2800km came over four days this January, when we decided to go dune bashing. I suppose it is safe to assume we have been the most adventurous Safari drivers in the year gone by, but we’d love to hear from someone wilder.
Until we do, here’s one wild ride...
I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THE NUMBER PLATE OFF BEFORE DIVING INTO THE LUNI RIVER
Deogarh in Rajasthan is 1,100km from Pune. It takes about 17 hours, and being judicious with our breaks, I knew that we could do it in 16. The Safari Storme has turned us into marathoners. It took us 18 hours anyway, with long queues at tolls as everyone swiped cards instead of cash or Fast Tags. 18 hours in any car is tiring. The vehicle can take it easily, but your foot aches with every gear change, the shoulders drop with every turn, and by the end of the night, we could just about crawl through the entrance porch of Dev Shree in Deogarh, our stay for the night. The luxury homestay is as warm and comforting as its owners, and just what tired travellers like us needed at the end of a long day. The next morning we drove over narrow trails through a forest, saw some wildlife, you know the stuff we have been doing with the Safari over the past few months. We then drove out to a place called Kakani, a couple of hours from Deogarh. Kakani is the start of a drive I never thought I’d put the Safari through.
Luni tunes
We get off the main road on to a dirt trail and stop to turn the shift-on-the-fly 4WD system to 4-High. It’s actually on the fly but better to be cautious than to shovel gravel out from under the Safari. So once I’m sure that all the power is going to all fours, I slot in to first gear and floor it. And almost all through, for the next couple of hours, I floor it in first, the tacho at its redline, a frantic engine screaming its heart out as I drive through gravel, sand, river beds, river crossings, thick shrubs, the works! Now I have crawled over rocks and through jungles but the desert is new to me and the skills required here were getting developed as I drove. First, conditioning the mind that it is fine to drive your car in first gear with your right foot stuck in like a lunatic, then trusting that there could be times you will scrape the sump and because the Safari Storme has a strong sump guard nothing is going to happen to it and you can carry on without a hitch, and third I should have taken the number plate off before diving into the Luni river.
The Luni river meanders through Rajasthan before
emptying itself into the Rann of Kutch. It passes through Ajmer and Jodhpur as it moves southwest. It runs for almost 500km which was surprising considering its depth at our first river crossing. All the damage the Luni did to our Safari was swallow our number plate. Then on, we powered through a fair bit of dry river bed, the Thar desert that runs alongside the river bed and a few villages that are part of our rural drive. The rural drive is a brainchild of Ajit Rana and Uday Bhan Singh, adventurers who have turned the hobby of driving their vehicles in 4-High into a profession. A few years ago, the duo started a company called Overlander India, and pun intended, they’ve been stuck in first gear ever since. We had caught up with Singh at Kakani village and drove into the Luni following his tracks as he gave us a tour of Rajasthan we would have never seen otherwise. Usually Overlander hosts foreigners with an adventurous bent of mind and takes them to the nearby villages to interact with the locals and soak in the culture. But we were here to do a lot of off-roading and Uday gave us just that. We drove through some tough terrain and crossed the Luni a few times. Some of the off-roading principles came in handy – thumbs out, quick hands at the wheel and trusting that it is okay for the engine to be this frantic. When the engine speed begins to drop and you are losing momentum, it is a bit of a worry, so the main thing while driving on loose ground is to keep your engine speed high enough to keep the wheels from sinking. There is no time to shift to second gear, and once you get to second on a stretch you know the ground is hard enough, you may not have the time to shift down to first when it gets loose again. Hence, it’s best to keep your momentum in first and stick to it.
After a few hours of honing my dune bashing skills Uday turns in to a village for lunch at a farmer’s house. The beauty