Srikakulam district

We appear to be halfway to Gangtok! Timewise and mileage-wise! We know that as we get towards the end it will get steeper and slower, so we are tending to get distance in now.

Today we were mostly on a limited-access highway, so we stopped for a breakfast snack with coffee and we stopped for lunch, but it felt like we didn’t have a lot of direct human interaction today. That is the downside of making good time on the highway.

But at the end of our breakfast stop we had to do dozens of iterations of selfies with the people there. And a cute young man with light-colored eyes showed up and everyone was so excited to get a picture of me with him because "our eyes matched”! I love that!

We have learned to look for “family restaurant” for a meal if we want an air conditioning break at lunchtime to escape the 100°+ heat. We found a nice one today, and the served “mocktails”, which we’ve encountered in other restaurants. Eric had a lovely paper umbrella in his.

We decided to push a little farther than our originally planned stopping point because we saw a beach resort that was a comfortable ways further. The crazy thing was, Google sent us on a route into the neighboring town onto dead-end roads that was the most remote-seeming place we’ve encountered so far. We finally reached a point where we could go no further, and a young woman who knew some English was summoned to direct us back out. I’m still picturing the chicken and it’s baby chicks wandering around where we stopped! Meanwhile, a couple dozen people or more had collected around us, and we had about a dozen children running after us as we headed out. Our second Google-led attempt ended at a dead end, also, but we could see the lighthouse by the resort. Two young men hopped in our rickshaw and told us where to go. It was an AMAZING experience!!!

We drive into the resort area and immediately see the rickshaw of our friends Brian and Tom! We had no idea that we would all end up at the same place tonight! And later two more rickshaws arrived, full of kids (I’m pretty sure they are our kids’ age) from the UK. We chatted over beers, and they are all delightful. BUT, we are slightly worried that they may pull some prank with our rickshaws…I’ll report back.

I’ll have to post again in the morning with pictures of this most interesting resort. It’s hard to guess when it was built. It sounds like we are all the first foreigners that have stayed here, and they were so delighted we were here!Read more