Davie Dawson

Day 4. On the road again.

After our disasters yesterday we hoped today would be plain sailing and we could make up for lost time. We had to leave the Rickshaw on the street last night, so hoped it would still be there in the morning. It was, but during the night someone took (took) one of the flags and the tank of petrol. Fortunately  we had taken our spare can in to the room with us, and we were on the road for 6.30am, heading for Hospet. Places look so much easier to  find on our 1:2,900,000 scale map than they actually are, but we only lost an hour driving round in circles today, so things are on the up. The roads were better than yesterday, and culminated in us reaching the N7 which is the main motorway which goes all the way up to Varanassi. This is the best road we have been on, and unbelievably quiet, which makes it much easier to react when buses and trucks come down the fast lane towards us. We did over 400km today, and plan to start at 5.30 tomorrow and get plenty distance under our belts. Our hotel for the night is the Hotel Radahajai in Kurnool which is much more expensive than last nights one, this is costing us £5 each. It has air con, but the toilet is a hole in the floor and the shower is a bucket and jug. Mozzie nets and liners again tonight!  Today we have been through massive industrial areas, so there are few hotels and we have to take whatever we can find. We have settled in to a steady diet of bananas for breakfast and lunch, and curries for tea. Tonight’s was the best yet, vegetable curry with chapattis cooked in banana leaves. With a bottle of coke this came to 90p each. Davie is loving the prices out here.It has been 2 days since we have seen any other teams, but we hear some of them are having mechanical problems, fortunately we have escaped this, but Gary Hay, keep your mobile phone on in case! We will get photos and video links on when we can, but it is dependent on connection levels out here.

Day 3:cows, monkeys elephants and idiots.

After much debate we decided not to go up the highway to Goa but cut across inland on lesser roads to save us a lot of time. Oh how wrong we were! The roads started off alright until we came to a formidable 1200m mountain pass with switchback after switchback that went on