These are guys who know their cars, running as they do a workshop outside Surat, and they swear by the Safari – its comfort and performance. This is their third Tata Safari, would you believe, joining a 2.2 DICOR and 3.0 DICOR, all three still in their garage. The next morning we head back out into the Rann and as we wait for the sun to rise (again spectacular!) we chat with Jaideep and Kunal in the brown Tata Safari Storme from Surat. Of course we make it out (not before Yamini gets lost and needs rescuing) and spend an evening dining under the moonlight in the Rann. We even crossed a family in a hatchback making for the Vachchhraj temple in the middle of the Rann where our snapper Gaurav sees a puppy so healthy and beautiful, he almost takes off with it before his wife assures him that his belongings will be on the road before he reaches Pune. At some places there are intersections with sign boards in Gujarati, and so that people don’t get lost at night or in a storm white poles and red flags are placed periodically at the edges of the track. This is new! I ask Aditya if the government has made this track but he says it’s maintained by the locals, and very well at that. Beyts are also where you will find Wild Asses grazing but it’s too late in the day and they’re probably out snoozing in the shade. We dig into brunch and carry on through the Little Rann, this time hitting a well-defined dirt track. Years of tourists doing the same have left it bereft of petrified wood and the scourge of illegal scavenging hasn’t even spared this place, with the smooth rocks being much in demand. I remember picking up some fossilised wood that used to be all over the place. And despite still being in the running-in phase, he easily maintains a high average speed on the Gujarat bit of the G-quad. Ours is not the only VARICOR 400 in this group, Ananjay from Mumbai bought his barely a month ago after being smitten by the space and comfort, after borrowing his brother-in-law’s Tata Safari on a recent drive to Bihar. This Tata Safari Storme also has excellent air-con, something I had criticised in the past.
This means you can maintain a high average speed irrespective of road conditions, the long-travel suspension taking it all in its stride, and with the 400Nm of torque, fifth and sixth gears are all that are required for quick progress. Sure the Tata Safari does wallow and pitch and the steering is like the helm of a ship but suspension setup is such that when you hit a bump the Tata Safari doesn’t pogo into the next lane – body movements are all vertical, not horizontal and worryingly unpredictable like other SUVs. I’m driving the Tata Safari Storme, with the VARICOR 400 engine (400 denoting the torque), and on the drive up to Dasada it reminded me of everything that I praised when I first drove the Safari all those years ago – a throne-like seating position offering perhaps the best view out of any car/SUV on sale today, great seats, acres of space, lovely ride and unflappable stability. What the Safari excels at is munching big distances in comfort and speed. Let’s be honest, the Tata Safari isn’t cut out for city commuting (unless you have a driver, in that case the acres of space and lovely ride makes it very nice).
Planning is also more important this time round as we have a much larger group and that’s at the core of this new series. Muzahid Malik was our host at Rann Riders in Dasada, on the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch, and he’s still in the business – still as enthusiastic as ever in planning our route but now fully in sync with what we need to get great pictures and videos. Today I’m back to where it all started, speaking to the man who introduced us and made us fall in love with the Rann. We were the first auto magazine guys to write about the Rann, the first to trek up to Ladakh, the first to drive across Bhutan we went dune bashing, drove through insurgent infested no-man’s-land in Assam – heck, every place we went to and everything we did invariably had the tag ‘first’ attached to it as it was still the early years of modern automotive journalism as we now know it.
#Tata safari storme autocar series#
And armed with two Tata Safaris we kick started a series that would keep us busy for a week every month. Adil, then editor at Overdrive, sent me to meet Bob Rupani who pointed me in the direction of the Rann of Kutch. We had to do something and that’s when I hit upon the idea of a 4×4 travel series.
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