Rollin' IndiaRolanje po Indiji

Jan 25th Not for the faint of heart (DE – RM)

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6 am. Packed our bags and off we went. The first real test of the bike – 300 km to Ramnagar (Jim Corbett National Park).

The day before we planed the trip online and wrote major towns in our booklet just in case something was wrong with GPS.

And so we rode into the mist…
6:30 and so much TRAFFIC?! Well, that’s a thing to get use to here. You’re never alone on the road. So honk, honk, blink, blink and be careful! Oh and another thing – traffic signs: sometimes in Latin, mostly Hindu. Take my advice: if you’re not sure where to go anymore, go straight. And every once in a while ask someone(that’s driving at least a ricksa).

After a while Tilen found a practical holder for the GPS-of course our phone navigation didn’t work(it would help remembering to download the app before the trip :P) so we had to improvise.

Leaving the city chaos, the trip got nicer and nicer. The scenery changed from gray concrete and rubbish to grasland and farm fields.

But here we came across another problem. All those farm products need transporting and that’s where the trucks (with power greedy drivers) come in.Gravel, bump, bump, bump, aiiiiir and landing. Some cursing in between and hysterical laughter after. We survived! There are only two trafic rules in India:drive on the left and ‘bigger is better’ – lighter vihicles must give way to heavier ones. So driving with a bike is … like being almost at the bottom of the food chain.Ok, back to the trip. About half way to Ramnagar the road got bad so we had to slow down and were not able to pass the big trucks. So we cruised on for a while until we heard something new,something huge blowing its horn and pushing the big trucks out of the way. It was a massive 8-wheeler with an (unnaturally) crazy Indian driver. I guess you can probably imagine what happened next… Gravel, bump, bump, bump, aiiiiir and landing. Some cursing in between and hysterical laughter after. We survived!

The last 50km weren’t going anywhere. While driving through one of the last towns we found a shue nail (using our front tire, that is). We stopped, a crowd gathered and the first person offered us a pump or a fix. His son took it apart, fixed it and was extremely happy with the 50Rp (about 85 cents) we gave him.

At about 16:00 we found the Corbet Motel, put our filthy clothes in the washer, ate and went to sleep.
Enough adventure for one day.

[geolocation]

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