Day 9

Having digested last night's malai kofte (yes, another one) we made a super early start today in our pledge to get a couple of days off in the baby Himalaya As I write this put pledge might just about be in tact, although we as always haven't made quite as much progress as we hoped. The trusty map is obviously to blame. Every evening we do some vaguely calculated route planning to find the right balance between finding the most direct route and staying on roads which are not too big (smelly trucks) and not too small (unpassable). And every day we rediscover that those nice people at the map place are clueless. As in all great countries the roads on the map are colour coded: double red, red, yellow, white, super thin red line - that's the hierarchy right? (we think the blue ones are rivers but hey it's dry season). No, in reality it's madness: red roads which are whiter than white ones, immense speedhumps and pot holes a plenty on double reds... Absolute madness! So crux of it is our route planning is pointless, we are a bit behind schedule and we had a wee puncture to deal with. Dealt with quickly by the gift of our spare tyre, the only bit of NippyTuk still working! The Riviera hotel generously threw in 'complimentary breakfast boxes' last night. Delicious cheese sandwiches and boiled eggs so we had brekkie on a speedhump somewhere called Suri. Earlier we drove through another (first since Vizag) industrial area... Coal fuelling it all: power stations, steelworks, collieries. There was coal everywhere, in the trucks, on a cable car over the road, in the chat carts, they have so much of it they even burn piles of it by the roadside to show off. Polluted skies and great for the lungs as you can imagine... A far cry from the 1000 or so windmills we saw on day 2 and hydro plants dotted around the countryside. Talking of water, this is something the government appears to have done a great job at: holding it back. Everywhere you go, barrage after barrage, holding back water to irrigate the padi fields and feed everyone. Mighty bits of engineering, not sure what the downstream implications might be or for the ecosystem. But in a country with a 75pct rural population you've got to carefully manage the water supply. Each person eats 20kg of rice per week! Benjy was very excited this morning at the prospect of crossing the mighty Ganges. It's geography textbook stuff, learning about how the Brahmaputra and Ganges basically feed all of northern India and all of Bangladesh. All this thanks to those great mountains Everest, Kanchenjunga, Annapurna and friends.

 Early afternoon we were punished for overexperimenting with the white roads. Got totally lost and had to backtrack a fair while to find Jangipur. Problem is, everyone just tells us ‘straight, straight, direct’ but we wonder if many have ever had the opportunity to leave their village. We were in the middle of absolute nowhere, yet there still appeared to be some sort of Bangra rave party going on in the middle of one tiny hamlet.

 The Ganges turned out to be big – very big, about 1.6km at the point we crossed – the only bridge for over 300km and still hundreds of kilometers from the delta into the Bay of Bengal. Benjy got excited, took photos and got told off by armed guards for taking photos. Come on, what’s wrong with a picture of the Ganges – textbook stuff!

 The afternoon went swimmingly. The road was pretty terrible and the trucks choking poor old Nippy Tuk, but we did reach Raiganj a really nice peaceful place, manageable size with a browsable high street and bazaar. The people, architecture and food have changed dramatically in the last couple of days. Starting to see some hill people around and the fact that we had ‘rolls’ and ‘noodles’ was clearly a sign of the hill influence – close to Chinese taste.

 Another big change has been the presence of bicycles. It has been the dominant form of transport for the last 2 days. Yes, we’ve seen plenty along the way, but now much fewer motorbikes. Perhaps a sign of affluence / flatter land, not sure. Also, no autorickshaws, not for two days. But more and more cycle rickshaws powered by the skinny legs of the mighty rickshaw wallahs. The lack of autos will no doubt make our search for a replacement spare tyre a bit more difficult.

Day 7

We had an early start this morning, getting on the road by 6.40, but out of all of the other adventurists, we were the last to leave the hotel... by an hour. We did potter down to the beach for a quick walk along... the beach! There was a wave, 2-3 foot and rideable, but with neither a board nor a surf shop or the inclination, we kept going. A little further on, we watched the local fisherman haul in 20 or so freshly caught tuna each a metre long.  Leaving the little village, we snaked and bumped our way up to the highway, and saw all the other rickshaws from last night. What a disaster - one team had forgotten to hand their keys back to the hotel, and so were turning around and one team had messed up the oil/fuel mixture at the petrol station, so they were going nowhere fast. We stopped and offered some lacklustre sympathy, before leaving them in our dust (yes, there’s still lots of that Indian dust here on the east coast)! According to our map, the highway extended all the way up the east coast, so you can imagine our annoyance as we find that it is still being built! As we were diverted at snails pace through little village dirt roads, trapped behind a hundred trucks, we guessed that the premature mappers had obviously just connected the dots. Stupid map. During the fourth diversion, we bumped into our friends Up the Boohai again, who told us that there was a rather lengthy tailback ahead, and they were heading back to find a way round. After some joint map examination, and a word with a friendly local, we decided to try our luck again.  What the local chap suggested may seem a little strange if you have never travelled on an Indian road, but we didn’t even think twice - it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You see, in India, there is no real highway code to speak of. The roads are there to get you from A to B. The guidebooks will tell you that India one drives on the left. But when the road is blocked (building, re-building, or just too busy), a driver may take it upon themselves to create a contra-flow, simply by crossing the central reservation. And thats what we did... We were flagged down by the police, and told to stop. As we accelerated through this checkpoint in convoy, we were eventually stopped by the presence of burning tyres in the middle of the road. They looked like rickshaw tyres. There were more police, army, and hundreds of onlookers. We weren’t going to break through this barricade. What we saw was rather sobering. There appeared to have been a nasty accident between a truck and a rickshaw (not one of our rickshaws), but we didn’t want to go any closer.  An army chap told us that despite there being enough room, we couldn’t drive around, and that it would all clear up in about 3 hours. He had a big gun, so we believed him, and sheepishly retreated back to the scene of our previous police chase. On the way, we met another nice motorcyclist, who offered to take us on the backroads (roads not on our map) to circumnavigate the accident.  On rejoining the highway, we both remarked at the three hundred or so trucks behind us, and that we would have a clear motorway for the foreseeable future. As soon as we had finished the sentence, the piston blew in our engine, and we ground to a halt, limped over to the side of the road, impotent in the midday sun. The whole fixing extravaganza took about 3 hours. Benjy went off on someone’s motorbike to find some civilisation. He returned with a man who announced ‘engine seize’ and we called for somebody to come and give us a tow into a village. There, a friendly enough mechanic laboured in the hot sun to discover the hole in our piston. A couple of bananas and samosas, an unseized engine and we were on our way again, albeit at a low top speed of 40kph to break in our newly acquired piston. After the first hour of slowly slowly, we then took a rather speedy speedy approach. It’s really tough when you’re on the road thinking, we are well behind schedule now and there are big gaps between towns (and therefore likely overnight) stops on the map. We had originally hoped to get to Baleshwar (aka Balasore) today, but thought we now might only make Bubaneshwar, capital of Orissa. As it was we not only cracked Bubaneshwar, but we also nailed Cuttack and made it on to Bhadrak, where we were welcomed in by an almighty thunderstorm. We spotted Hotel Orion from the main road, and did an innumerable number of u-urns to find a way in. The Orion was a welcoming place, more modern than most and delivered a fantastic malai kofte to calm us down, recover from a long and arduous day through accidents, breakdowns, thunderstorms in addition to the usual cocophany of goats, dust, trucks,  cows, horn ok please and contraflows. Bring on Shillong!!

Day 6

We didn’t have much time to write about day 6, which is a good thing as it was mainly uneventful. Yes, we went a long way. We were aiming for breakfast in a place called Rishikonda, just past the big city of Vishakapatnam (also known as Vizag) – a huge port and steel centre.  Excited about breakfast-sur-mer we set off early, but it soon started to rain and brekkie became a damp affair. Soggy egg dosa and banana juice (banana juice???) to replace the lacking pineapple juice. The highlight of the day was definitely the coastal road which we coasted along at a leisurely pace.  It was a long old day and it rained (not heavily) pretty much all day. Lunch was taken in a rather aggressive truckers restaurant and we spent the afternoon on the expressway trundling towards Gopalpur on Sea, where we bumped into a few other teams. We shared a few beers with the others and slept in a great little place run by a man from the Andaman Islands, born to Burmese parents. Interesting mix, a great host and fab value at Rs200. Can you believe we are still in Andhra Pradesh, it goes on and on and on.

Day 5

Today was St George’s Day (I think) where we drove through gorgeous scenery in search of a gorge. Obviously nobody (including us) gave a damn about St George’s Day, we never found the gorge but the valley leading to it was certainly gorgeous - 1 out of 3.  We took the worst road in Asia for tens of kilometres along one of India’s widest rivers, which is irrigates a gazillion hectares of farmland. This road through villages, farmland and irrigation lakes would take us to the gorge. It went bumpily on and on and there was some navigational sun-worshiping required. After several hot hours, the road ended at the river’s edge (after some negotiating with people who needed their pride and authority reinstating). We could go no further, except without NippyTuk and only boat. Only thing is that there was a clear lack of boats. After some pontification, we turned around, rebumped all the bumps and considered how far we could reach that afternoon if we returned to the dreaded and slightly monotonous (not so coastal) coastal expressway. It ended up being Tuni, the perfect place for some engine tuning.  Finding a hotel required use of the word lodge or ‘ladge’ to persuade the locals of what we were looking for. Our most respectable establishment to date (purely because it had a lift with a fan in it), fetching an additional Rs50 per night. The rest of the evening was equally good value. NippyTuk had a full facial, manicure and pedicure for less than a tenner and we nailed dinner for a mere Rs85. Tuni was another dustbowl, with few redeeming features beyond a very hot bathroom, a ‘perfect’ mechanic (according to his nephew) and some expensive beer from the ‘wine shop’ in what is supposed to be a dry state - yes, you guessed it, we’re still in Andhra Pradesh. After dinner we had a pleasant stroll around the town centre and splashed out on two bananas.  As Alex Ferguson or any other red-faced chewing gum chewing football manager (Harry, Roy, and Co) would say - it was a game (day) of two halves. We definitely enjoyed the morning countryside, but the expressway is starting to wear a little thin. We are totally dependent on it though, because without it there is simply is no way of making it to Shillong in 14 days and allow for a day off in the mountains.

Day 4

An early start from the dustbowl that is Maidukuru involved retrieving NippyTuk from its luxury parking spot at the edge of the aforementioned open sewer. We turned right and east straight away over and then down the hills (coasting with very little petrol) to Badvel. As always, the response to our question

10 days to go

A really big thank you to Winterwell 2011 for sponsoring Nippy Tuk... The Little Summer Festival ([www.winterwell.co.uk](http://www.winterwell.co.uk/)) - we are very grateful. We hope to give our followers and sponsors access to discounted tickets to the festival, in return Winterwell will donate additional funds to our Tamil Nadu based charity Social Care and Development.

Thanks to Winterwell's penchant for graphic design, we also now have a design for NippyTuk - you can get a sneak preview on twitter @NippyTuk. Otherwise you'll have to wait for us to post our photos from Kochi in two weeks time.

Only two weekends to go. The doc is working and so I'm off to do a bit of shopping. Big debate last night over a red thai curry last night as to whether to 'trust' the iPhone compass. Apparently we need a 'real' one, so the geographer is off to buy a compass. Think it's going to be a case of 'all the gear and no idea'. I have now posted our (possible, but unlikely) route on the website, so do check it out.

I was watching a programme on ITV last week - a travel journalist was taking the road from Coonoor to Ooty - windy, steep, wet... but stunning scenery. Let's hope the scenery is not so stunning that we take our eyes off the road, the passing trucks, hungry cows and kids playing cricket.

Does anyone have any tips on Kochi - where to stay or what to do for 2 days - we have two days of R&R before the driving lessons start and before we start building a close rapport with NippyTuk. Backwaters, town, beaches, tricycling - any tips?

Time for breakfast - rice and dhal? or massala dosa?

Bye for now