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The Great India Adventure

April - May 2023
A 35-day adventure by Staci & Eric Read more
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  • 35days
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  • 23.4kmiles
  • 19.1kmiles
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  • The Great India Adventure
    Day 10

    Nellore

    April 13, 2023 in India ⋅ ☀️ 86 °F

    Now we are in the state of Andhra Pradesh and traveling near and along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Arabic food for dinner last night, Indian this morning! Vada for breakfast again today! Heading north paralleling the coast today to stay at the beach tonight!! 🌊Read more

  • The Great India Adventure
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    Day 10

    Quick pit stop @ Bajaj dealer in Kavali

    April 13, 2023 in India ⋅ ☀️ 97 °F

    Topped up our engine oil - 500 ml plus extra to take with us (in a used water bottle!) - no charge!! ❤️🇮🇳❤️

  • The Great India Adventure
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    Day 10

    Chirala and wading in the Bay of Bengal

    April 13, 2023 in India ⋅ 🌙 84 °F

    We had a shorter day of driving so that we could stay in a nice resort hotel at the beach. It is a lovely contrast to where we stayed a couple nights ago!

    Along our way today we bought mangos from a roadside stand in an area where there were dozens of roadside mango sellers, each with hundreds of mangos stacked in neat pyramids on their tables. There were huge mango trees growing in orchards on either side of the road. We bought 4 mangos for about $1!

    We saw herds of buffalos a couple times today, and an area of flooded man-made ponds that we think were for farming shrimp.

    By the way, our room for tonight is about $60. The bottom-of-the-barrel room we had a couple nights ago was about $13. Really good sit-down meals have run us about $12-13 for both of us. Our chia teas cost about 55-60 cents. It’s hard to wrap my head around the cheap prices! Interestingly, fuel seems to be about equivalent in price to home.    Read more

  • The Great India Adventure
    Day 11

    Onward, day 6!

    April 14, 2023 in India ⋅ ⛅ 86 °F

    Sometimes it’s hard to get going quickly because we meet such friendly people!

    Also, someone was staying at this resort who had armed guards. Friendly armed guards, thank goodness.

  • The Great India Adventure
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    Day 11

    Lunch at Vihari Family Restaurant

    April 14, 2023 in India ⋅ ☀️ 97 °F

    We are traveling in an area where we just may be the only foreigners to pass through and stop in a looong time. We stopped for snacks and water at a roadside stand and chatted with a man who is a shrimp farming technologist whose English is very good. He told us that the coast is a center for shrimp aquaculture. He also recommended a restaurant with AC for lunch that was only 10km further down the road the way we are going, so we decided to stop for a real lunch instead of snacking.

    Holy cow.

    We were the first foreigners to ever eat at this restaurant, and we were treated so kindly, and like royalty. Another customer ended up sitting with us to eat, and eventually the host sat with us to! Many selfies were taken, and Eric left a great Google review for them. And in the end they wouldn’t even let us pay!! 🥲❤️    Read more

  • The Great India Adventure
    Day 11

    Rajamahendravaram & friends from home!

    April 14, 2023 in India ⋅ 🌙 84 °F

    We’ve seen quite a bit of road improvements happening along our journey so far, and what’s amazing is that everyone can still drive through the area as fancier roadways are being built. We felt like we were 4-wheeling a couple times today.

    It felt like we were traveling through some very rural areas today. We kept seeing youth riding around waving blue flags with a man’s face on it, and I was a little worried about that was happening. Turns out it is the birthday today (4/14) of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the man who led the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution. He was a politician and social reformer. Evidently today is referred to as Equality Day in some parts of India.

    We saw more shrimp farming, and beautiful fields of a grain that we also saw harvested and drying on tarps. We passed through an area late in the day where bricks were being made and fired out in the open with smoldering fires.

    And at the end of the day we ended up at a lovely hotel and who should we run into but our buddies Tom and Brian of team FOFO - Falls On Face Often. Brian and Eric work together as paramedics in Shoreline and worked out doing this event together after I told them about a related event called the Mongol Rally.
    We had a blast catching up with them over dinner and drinks at the hotel bar. We stayed up later than normal, so we’ll see if we keep to our string of early starts! 😄    Read more

  • The Great India Adventure
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    Day 12

    Haritha Beach Resort adventure

    April 15, 2023 in India ⋅ ☁️ 99 °F

    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

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    Day 13

    Haritha hotel and beach in daylight

    April 16, 2023 in India ⋅ ☁️ 84 °F

    This was the most welcoming hotel we have stayed at so far on our trip, and we hate to leave!

    The manager/owner was a Microsoft employee before he started leasing this property. It was originally build and run by the government to promote tourism, and it was a very popular destination, but it was damaged by a typhoon in 2019 and not repaired. This man has been fixing it back up, but he said people don’t realize it’s up and running again.

    We had morning chai (aka masala tea) and went for a quick walk to the water. After we loaded up we had a tour of the neighboring lighthouse!

    We are heading on a side loop into the Eastern Ghats and then to a larger city for the night. We figured we need to make an average of ~200km a day from here on out!    Read more

  • The Great India Adventure
    Day 13

    Chhatrapur Fire Station visit!

    April 16, 2023 in India ⋅ ☁️ 97 °F

    We were driving down the highway and noticed a fire station on the side of the highway! So hopped off and went back to take a look.

    Oh my gosh! We were treated like visiting dignitaries! The assistant chief took us to his office and we had quite the chat! The fire service looks like it’s culture is more like the military, and the firefighters live at the station.

    Eric now has a new Indian firefighter brother. We have his phone number if we have any troubles in this state (Odisha). He presented his contact info to us in the front of a beautiful hard-cover planner/diary. Incredible!    Read more

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    Day 14

    The Konark Sun Temple

    April 17, 2023 in India ⋅ ⛅ 91 °F

    It’s hard to believe that this is day 9 of 14 of the Rickshaw Run!!

    Our end spot yesterday was a bit off track because we ended up deciding to visit the Konark Sun Temple this morning. I believe it’s the first UNESCO World Heritage site that we’ve ever visited! It was a very hot, crowded place, but once again we lucked out with a wonderful legit guide who saw us in the crowd and offered to guide us through.

    This Hindu temple was built in the 12th century, and the largest structure was actually later demolished by Muslims. All of the stone (guide said sedimentary stone) surfaces are intricately carved. There are 24 wheels, each with 8 spokes, and our guide explained that represents how the day is divided into 8 3-hour sections. at least in some of the wheels. He also showed us how you can tell time by where the shadow of the central stone hits in the circle.

    We felt badly that we were constantly saying “No” to people asking for photos/selfies with is, but we were afraid if we said yes to one person, we’d be there ALL day, and the guide confirmed that.

    Last night we stayed at a resort with lovely gardens that I found ahead on Expedia. The first two times we reserved hotel rooms via Expedia it worked like a charm. This time not so much. I reserved a “Deluxe Cottage with garden view” that was $84 - the most we’ve spent on lodging. But they put us in a 4th floor room that had seen better days, and said that the “garden view” was looking down out of the window. Luckily Eric had the patience to keep pushing, and they moved us to a lovely garden cottage. It really is amazing how well we can get along even with a massive language barrier.

     Now we are heading to stay tonight at the coast near Balasore, our last time on the coast before we head inland.    Read more

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