If you need to drive from Bangalore to Trichy or Tanjore, you can take NH7 all the way down to Namakkal. From there you have two choices. You can either take SH25, down to Thottiyam, Musiri, and on to Trichy. You drive parallel to the Cauvery river, north of the river, and then cross over to enter Trichy. The second option is to continue to drive down to Karur, and then take NH67, that runs south of the Cauvery river. This highway is being four-laned, and once complete, will be a joy to drive on. The four-laning has been completed on the stretch between Trichy and Tanjore, but the process is not yet complete from Trichy to Karur.
So how is the state highway SH25? It is a mixed bag to be sure. From Namakkal to Thottiyam the road is good, with a few bad patches in-between. There is not much traffic, and you can do good time. From Thottiyam onwards the road starts to deteriorate, and near Musiri it is actually quite bad. There are no deep potholes as such, and this is a good thing, but the road has cracks all over. This is the result of the hundreds of trucks that ply on this road. All of them seem to be ferrying earth mined from the Cauvery river. As you drive on this stretch you come across tens of trucks lined behind each other, on both sides of the road. This makes overtaking pretty much impossible, and since this is a two-laned road, any vehicle parked along the side of the road can cause traffic to slow down to a crawl.
Since the highway runs parallel to the Cauvery river, you can see vast stretches of farmland with sugarcane and paddy plantations. The river bed evidently makes for supremely fertile soil, and during the monsoon months you can see a lot of activity in the fields.
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© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.
So how is the state highway SH25? It is a mixed bag to be sure. From Namakkal to Thottiyam the road is good, with a few bad patches in-between. There is not much traffic, and you can do good time. From Thottiyam onwards the road starts to deteriorate, and near Musiri it is actually quite bad. There are no deep potholes as such, and this is a good thing, but the road has cracks all over. This is the result of the hundreds of trucks that ply on this road. All of them seem to be ferrying earth mined from the Cauvery river. As you drive on this stretch you come across tens of trucks lined behind each other, on both sides of the road. This makes overtaking pretty much impossible, and since this is a two-laned road, any vehicle parked along the side of the road can cause traffic to slow down to a crawl.
Since the highway runs parallel to the Cauvery river, you can see vast stretches of farmland with sugarcane and paddy plantations. The river bed evidently makes for supremely fertile soil, and during the monsoon months you can see a lot of activity in the fields.
View Larger Map
© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.
