Toyota River Drive: Narmada: Day Two Blog

Exploring historic places while driving the Toyota Yaris

Day two of the Toyota River Drive saw us head to a number of historically and culturally important places driving the Toyota Yaris. We had an early breakfast and left to see Bawan Gaja near Barwani. The place is historically important and also is the site of the world’s largest megalithic (carved out of the mountain) statue. The statue of Lord Rishabhadeva, the first Jain Tirthankara, is 84-feet tall and was built in the 12th century.

Read the first drive review of Toyota Yaris here

After visiting Bawan Gaja, we headed out for a quick lunch before heading onwards to Maheshwar. We wanted to see the Maheshwar Fort built on the bank of the Narmada. The Fort houses artefacts that are centuries old including a swing made of solid gold. The walls of the Fort consist of elaborate and rather intricate stone carvings that date back to the 1700s. After getting lost (momentarily) walking up and down the stairs of the Fort and taking a whole lot of photographs, we decided it was time to leave. We left Maheshwar and the next stop was Omkareshwar. The traffic soon became heavy and the narrow state highway that we were on didn’t provide much of a shot at overtaking. So we were stuck behind trucks and the drive to Omkareshwar took longer than expected. By the time we got to Omkareshwar it was already late and we decided against going in.

The roads went from bad to worse as we drove towards Hoshangabad, but the Yaris displayed remarkable poise in handling the bad roads. After battling traffic and bad roads, we soon found a perfect stretch of road going through forests. It had every sort of corner imaginable and the surface was free of any undulations whatsoever. Hrushi enjoyed his time behind the wheel of the Yaris and the Yaris too seem to like tackling the winding roads. The meaty steering of the Yaris came across as perfect on our spirited drive. But soon, we were back on roads that to say the least weren’t as pretty. Construction activity on a stretch of road as long as 20km ensured that we had to crawl our way through.

Read more about Toyota here

After a nearly 14-hour long day we finally reached Hoshangabad and simply put couldn’t stay up any longer.
Tomorrow would bring some respite with a drive to Jabalpur that promises to be much shorter.