to Yellapur: watching people work

January 28, 2016

The chaos on the streets was building as we wove our way around street barriers to find the road out of town. We will stay on NH 63 to the coast. The road has a good new surface with a 3-5 inch drop off the sides to a rough dirt shoulder. In some spots, there was infilling of dirt to the edge, but was not compacted for cycling.

Gone are the flat hills turning into rolling hills, nothing really steep. The first stretch of road was relatively quiet until around Kalghatgi where two other roads briefly merged with NH 63. Then there were plenty of trucks sharing the road with us. Most of the truck drivers are very cautious of us the bus drivers not so much. The landscape changes and we are cycling through a forest. Again, we see snapshots of people's daily life. Stopping in one village for pastries and coffee and later in another trying to find an egg puff. No luck, but did try a new pastry that was a sweet bread filled with vegetables, served on a square of newspaper as a plate.

One final climb into Yellapur and just as we enter, Patrick spots the hotel other cyclists have stayed. Not knowing if anything else is available in town, we check in. The Sambraham Lodge is a dump, but the cheapest dump we've stayed in so far. Maybe it's all relative to having stayed in CNN partner hotels the past few days where we had a newspaper at our door in the morning. Not expecting that to happen tomorrow, as this evening, we've only just got a light for the room.

When we first checked in around noon, the fan worked, there was a light in the bathroom, (which by the way the bath was a bucket bath and the toilet is squat toilet and flushed by pouring water down the hole), but the outlets and light for the room didn't work. For a few hours, we could hear them in the hallway working on getting power, the light in our room would come on briefly, then off, then more working outside in the hallway, then on again and off again.

Now it's on, we can charge our electronic devices and put away our headlamps to read our books.

Nice Islamic building on the outskirts of Hubli with Hindu flower offerings in the passageway

A little further down the road this large Hindu gate

Many brick making yards between Hubli and Yellapur

Colorful flower strings for sale in the market.

Installing the steel band on a cart wheel.

Large lumberyards in the forests we pass through.

Buying an orange flower garland for Rachel's bike.

Today's ride: 68 km (42 miles)
Total: 12,131 km (7,533 miles)

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