Ah, two days and 800+km across India in a crappy rickshaw with absolutely no technical problems? Can it be so?! How long can we keep this rolling?
Some random cultural tidbits – around here, they shake their head (more like a bobble-head motion) to indicate affirmative, thank you, etc. This can get very confusing when you ask something (“Do you have petrol?”) and it looks like they are shaking their head no.
The movement for “no” is actually a wiggle of the hand that matches the Western movement for "maybe” – again, confusing. “Do you have petrol?” answered by “maybe?” We get all excited – yes or no? How much? Just a little? Then realize they mean no, they don’t have any.
We finally figured out the details of this about three days ago and are still having problems adjusting at times, but we’ve found the “no” motion of the hand to be a life-saver in getting pesky merchants off us (to be fair, it probably confuses them when we shake our head which looks like an affirmative!).
Day 6: 415km, ~11 hours on the road
Today was by far the smoothest day of our trip, going almost exactly according to plan. Tak & I woke up at 5AM and were on the road by 6AM while Malena & Adam slept peacefully. We were out of the city by 7AM and started ripping up the NH5 at full speed (~55kph) whenever possible. In a way it turned out to be a fairly boring and uneventful day, but this was a nice break.
Around noon we had already made 200km and stopped for a quick lunch at a road-side shack. All they served was dosa (spelling?) but it had fried onions in it (new to me so far in India) and was fantastic. I took over driving from Tak and we zipped up to our destination by 4PM, arriving in, um… Visakhapunam or something like that. We did wander around as usual a bit trying to find a place to stay, but eventually ended up in a beach resort suite for all four of us for around $15US each. The view is amazing!
It’s nice to be somewhere while it’s still light, so we’re going to head down to the beach shortly and wander around, then have a nice relaxing dinner while we wait for Malena and Adam to make it.
We didn’t get any repairs done as planned, however the rickie held up great and we’re hoping to give minor repairs another try tomorrow. Cheers!
Day 7: ~430km, ~11 hours on the road
I’m not sure if it was awesome today to finally break up the monotony of NH5 with some horrible sections that were under construction or it was annoying. Either way, Tak & I were off by 6AM and made it to our destination at 4:30PM which was perfect. If NH5 had continued as a big divided highway all the way up we probably would’ve arrived at 3PM, but instead a huge section was under construction and went from divided to shared many times as well as going to rock and dirt and just a small older style road for awhile.
We stopped for lunch in a little shack on the side of the road and had some great authentic food, samosas and little donut things and some potato soup to go with – for both of us the lunch came to 46 rupees, barely over a dollar. Talk about cheap and yummy!
We’re now staying in a very upper class hotel in Bhubaneswar that’s quite cheap, it’s probably the nicest place we’ve stayed. Nice to have plenty of space and a very clean room! Tomorrow we hope to get our rickshaws serviced, but it’s Sunday and everyone may be closed… we shall see what happens.
No mechanical problems at all for the last two days! Woo!
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