Bhāgalpur

The traffic in Bhagalpur this evening was crazy, and Eric handled it like a champ. What a relief it was to pull up to the hotel we picked off of Google maps and be greeted by the owner holding open the door. And we were expecting to pay 4500-5000 rupees, but he bargained us DOWN to 3500 for a lovely suite room!! Let’s call that $43. Crazy!

I was wrong yesterday about the states that we would travel through. Today we passed through the state of Jharkhand (where the protest was) and now we are in the state of Bihar (a dry state!). Tomorrow we will travel back into West Bengal as we aim for Darjeeling probably on Friday. Darjeeling is at ~6700 feet! Looking forward to relief from the heat!

It was SO hot once again today, and the humidity is much lower inland. Our phones are just hammered by the heat. It’s nearly impossible to charge them back up when they are so hot, and we don’t have a cooler to cool them off. But I figured out a trick of wrapping them in a wet bandana to get an evaporative cooling effect. In no time one would cool down and charge up quickly. Hurray!

Speaking of phones - I am using an eSIM from Airalo on my phone with a data plan for India that I can easily top up as needed. I set it up before we left home. 10GB/30days for $27. I just ran out today and topped it off with another 10GB. The only catch is it doesn’t warn you when you are running low, it just stops connecting to the internet. Eric bought a reconditioned older iPhone and purchased a physical SIM card with a good data plan for $7 for 30 days. He did this in Fort Cochi after we got here. $7?!! It’s been handy to have that Indian phone/number.Read more