West Bengal, India
Saturday - having had a great sleep and drinks with other teams on Roshida beach near Vishakapatnam we managed an early start at 6am and covered almost 200 km by 11am... Unfortunately, this is when we broke down in the middle of the highway. The next ten an a half hours are quite difficult to express in words but to give some feel for the situation - initially helped by a few people claiming to be mechanics but actually just some locals trying to make a buck out of us, driving kilometres along the road trying to find some part for the Rickshaw which didn't exist to then be towed for around 60km across the border of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha by a lorry that was required to wait hours on both exit and entrance to each state... Finally finding a real mechanic who fiddled around with our battery for just over ten minutes the Rickshaw was fixed... Being in the dark in the middle of some quite small villages we decided to power through the night to stick to the initial plan of getting to Bhubaneswar (c. 170km away). With the assistance of our lorry driver friends (will write a separate note on them further down) we powered on throughout the night - with headlights barely working, oncoming traffic headlights blinding us and finally heavy rain and thunderstorm drenching us we managed to reach Bhubaneswar just after 3:30am...
Sunday - to stick to the schedule we set ourselves we woke up at 8 and headed out on the road... Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get very far - still within the boundaries of the city we had another breakdown.. Luckily, after pushing the Rickshaw for a bit we were able to find a real mechanic quite quickly who went through our engine cleaning it up as apparently we were not mixing enough oil into the petrol... Nb for f ** some text is missing **
Andhra Pradesh, India
So we made it to Vizag!400km of highway with a detour in a small village along a river, that we crossed on a looong old bridge, a breakfast in the tuktuk made of idli(spongy rice cakes), puri and vadas ( deep fried dough). The rickshaw liked it! We made it to Vizag at 4pm, ahead our plan to arrive at 6pm. Sai Priya Resort here we go! How to describe this place...a crazy potential, beach, large parc, swimming pool, tree house bar but everything look dodgy, dirty and sad. We found 5 other teams there and managed to set up our own bar area in the tree house followed by a nice curry!back on the road at 6.30am on our way to Bhubaneswar
Andhra Pradesh, India
so we decided to stop here in the end as we discovered an extremely nice hotel, we couldnt say no! Especially after the hideous place the night before. It was an early start though, 400km to do today, so we were ready to leave in the lobby at 6am...we'll let you know how the journey went!
Andhra Pradesh, India
quick stop for dosas and curry for late lunch after fairly monotonous drive today so far. Hopefully we'll find a spare tyre an we'll head for a town down the road
Andhra Pradesh, India
after this mornings swim, we made it across thr state border, not without an interesting trip around Chennai's bypass....even queueing behind the first crash (read:rolled lorry) we've seen yet. Not the only one of the day though, Ed managed to bump into the back of a new car, so new in fact there was still plastic covering the seats! We also saw a tractor drive into the back of a lorry when the driver started to stare at Milena and disnt realise the traffic in front had stopped-quite funny! And so, we arrive into the small town and find a few other teams. Nice! After dinner (no drinks-another dry town!) we go to the hotel room to sleep. Wha can i say about it? The walls are so dirty it looks like someone was butchered in here past week, it smells like they left the aforementioned corpse here for the rest of the week and, the worst part, Alix discovering a rat in the bin. The nastiest place we ever hope to stay!
