The next leg of the ride was through the state of Gujarat. Riding through this state was a transit to get to Maharastra. We broke the journey into a two-day ride-through – Udaipur to Baroda on the first and Baroda to Dadra on the next.
Continue reading The Big 2009 Ride: Day 8 – Udaipur to Baroda
The hotel that we had booked in Udaipur had claimed a view of lake Picchola – it indeed was a view of the lake, but mossy green far end of it – con job of a place! The consolation was that the rooms were nice and clean, the parking was safe for the bike and we would be spending the whole day out anyway. We decided to stay.
This is day 6 of the ride and if you’ve missed the story till now, you can see the earlier 5 days on The Big 2009 Ride page. Continue reading The Big 2009 Ride: Day 7 – Udaipur
We got up late and did not hurry through the packing, since we planned an extra day’s stay at Udaipur and reaching there late evening was alright. We started riding from Jodhpur to Udaipur at around 8 AM. The plan was to visit Ranakpur and Kumbalgadh fort on the way.
Continue reading The Big 2009 Ride: Day 6 – Jodhpur to Udaipur
Sunrise in Rajasthan is quite spectacular due to (relatively) unpolluted air and clear skies. We rode out of Jaisalmer before sunrise, hoping to put in some kilometers of riding in the couple of cool hours we had before the sun got to its full glory. This is one of the views we had, out on the highway from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur.
Continue reading The Big 2009 Ride – Day 5: Jaisalmer to Jodhpur
The night had been extremely windy and we could hear sand thrashing against the tent walls. We woke up to half of our tent buried under the sand in the wee hours of the morning. The landscape looked a bit different from the previous evening, like as if the dunes had moved around a bit (there was a smallish dune behind our tent too, with some of it burying it!) It then dawned on us that what the camel herder was talking about the previous evening was not some banter, but fact: that in the desert, the dunes move because of the wind, and they usually tend to cover anything in the landscape that is static; The trees and shrubs would disappear and so would the roads and paths. Lesson learnt: Trust local knowledge!
