La Route des Grandes Alpes

Today we went down The route of the grand alps. We - that is yours truly, Hazem, the brother of my officemate at Rice Khaled now interning at Grenoble and Vibhor from IITD interning at EPFL - started from Grenoble around 11 am. Before that I made a failed attempt to add either of them as additional drivers of the car. But, Hertz refused on their licenses being Indian and Egyptian. I was a bit apprehensive initially as the drive was long, but as you will see later, I thanked my gods that they dint get the permit. Also, our car got changed from Lausanne itself into a Volkswagon Polo, upgraded as they didn't have the smallest car. It was good, as I was not sure of driving all around with some stupid American car. :-)

Now, Grenoble is right in the middle of a valley surrounded by high alps all around. Someone who had lived there had told me, it is really a bit depressing and clautrophobic living like that. It's true actually. But, it is still famous on lieu of being on the French Alps and acts as a big base for the ski loving Europeans. I started driving on the highways initially - pretty much similar to US - and then took the small windy mountainous road which became the famous route further down. It was a beautiful road surrounded by mountains all around. The road steadily winding it's way up the slopes. The car was sluggish because of its 67 bhp, and 3 people in it. Also, I guess I had gotten used to the surge of power from my M3. I had my foot down on the accelerator throughout, which my passengers seemed a little tensed about. But, they got used to it, at least I hoped so. And this is a perennial problem, my dad confirmed - driver has the control of his car and knows how it feels, but the passengers can't understand that.

Anyways. We were going up along the mountains, climbing steadily higher and higher. Sometimes, we would reach a lovely plateau, all verdant green and nice. At the highest point of our trip, we reached such a lovely plateau and stopped. It was filled with grazing sheep, the bells from their necks made lovely tinkling noises. Felt so surreal. So, the bells that DDLJ made famous, does really hand from the necks of cows and sheep - and not from doors. That's only for tourists. I was enjoying driving a lot by now. Had gotten completely confortable with the car, and it was responding purr-fectly to my hard driving. On downslopes, even engine braking was not working as much. So, I was pretty much driving at 80-100 km/hr along narrow mountainous roads. Thrilling. And quite a few cars was doing the same. Screeching tires. Hair-pin bends. Deep valleys. lovely mountains. Snow peaks here and there. green meadows. In all a heady mix. Then came a portion of the highway which was mostly so narrow as to let only one car pass. I had been to such roads in the Himalayas, but of course had never driven. Every time a car came from the opposite direction, one of them had to stop or back up at a broad enough space for both cars to pass. Finally after 8 hours of driving - and a couple of times getting lost on the little town road along the way - we reached Nice at 8 pm.

It was then that we realized that none of us had the name, address or phone number of the hostel we were supposed to stay at night. So dumb of us. After 1 hour of aimless roaming about, I got the hostel name from my laptop, went into an internet cafe and found the directions and reached there at 10 pm. By that time I was dead tired from all the driving. But, we went out for dinner in the lovely old town of Nice. Had, what else, pizza. The cheapest option in this amazingly touristy town. And while coming back, I gave in to much pestering from Vibhor and let him drive. In 2 seconds, he had backed onto another car while getting out of the parking lot. It was bad, but I felt better thinking that this happened in the parking lots, and not in the crazy streets outside with some miving car. Then I drove back and just crashed onto my bed - one of the rows of beds lined up in a big room teeming with people.