Road Trip from Hyderabad to Delhi

It takes driving passion, a wonderful partner (to talk for hours 😊) and some planning to take road from Hyderabad to Delhi. It may look preposterous at the first thought, but travelling from Hyderabad to Delhi by road is a wonderful experience as most of your kilometers will be consumed on NH44 which is a well maintained 4 lane highway.

Google maps “From Hyderabad to Delhi” shows 1587 kms and a journey of around 26 hours. The numbers are huge, but if you plan well and can break the journey in 3 days, it will be a road trip to remember.

We decided to go to Delhi from Hyderabad via road in our Jeep Compass to avoid flights due to corona scare (as our 3 years old son just refuses to wear mask). We divided our journey in 3 days, 8 hours of driving every day and took a 1 hour break after every 4 hours.

Day 1

• We started at 7:30 a.m. , got our breakfast packed from Udipi (a South Indian breakfast chain serving fresh breakfast very early in the morning, and they are so many in the city, you’ll find one on way)
• It took around 1 hour to catch NH-44

🙋‍♀️ Start early to avoid city traffic and have a good start

• Reached around 2 p.m. in Nagpur and took a 1.5 hours break for lunch in Le Meridian, the hotel is nice, lunch was good and is located near highway
• Started back and drove for next 3 hours and reached Seoni around 6:30 p.m.
• Road condition till now: Once you catch NH-44, road is very smooth. You will be crossing Pench National Park through NH-44, nothing to be worried about it, as this is a well elevated stretch over Pench Tiger reserve, ensuring undisrupted movement of animals from beneath.
• Checked-in to the Hotel Grand Rajwada, Seoni, the hotel is ok ok, fine enough to hop on for a night.

🙋‍♀️ Marriages and parties do take place in this hotel, so ask beforehand if there’s going to be any such event on your booking date, you can also explore resorts in or around Pench National Park (Pench comes just before Seoni), we did not want to divert too much away from highway, so chose this.

Day 2

• Started at 9 a.m. after having breakfast, caught NH44 in around 2 kms.
• Drove for 3 hours and took a break for lunch in a random dhaba which was located near some farms.
• Road condition: The road is wonderful in this stretch, you will also be crossing Chambal badlands along way, which is an amazing site.
• Reached Jhansi around 4 p.m. and checked-in to Nataraj Sarovar Portico, very nice hotel with awesome food. The hotel is around 10 kms away from highway inside the city, but there are no options on the highway.

🙋‍♀️ You can plan to visit Shri Ram Raja Mandir of Orccha in the evening, it is around 20 kms from hotel.

Day 3

• Started a little late, around 11:30 a.m. for Noida (our residence)

🙋‍♀️ A stay in Gwalior would have been better instead of Jhansi as we could easily cover some more distance on the second day

• From Jhansi onwards, road condition is not as good as it was till now. There can be lot of traffic on NH-44.
• We hit Agra at 4 p.m., so time to leave NH-44 and catch Yamuna Expressway, but for that you have to cross entire Agra city and this was the only painful stretch of this trip as there were local markets on the way and ongoing metro construction.
• Around 5:30 p.m. we reached Yamuna Expressway and it was super smooth beyond that. We reached Noida in next 2 hours 20 minutes.