Dakshin Mahayatra

Today we were going to Debrigarh. Never heard of the place? Geographically, it is close to Hirakud Dam, which is again close to Sambalpur, a town in Orissa on the Mumbai-Kolkata highway. But our interest was not just in its lat and long. Debrigarh has a Wildlife Sanctuary, and that has accommodations inside, called D Nature Park (by D I meant Debrigarh, the abbreviation saved some space, I hope). Being about 250 km from Bhawanipatna, we left at 7.15 am and hoped to reach D by lunchtime. All the meals were included in the tariff, because they felt that guests would not like to travel 10 km to a restaurant, even if a Michelin Star, and Swiggy might charge too much hazard pay. Therefore, we could not miss the free lunch.  Our travel today was mostly on NHs -NH26  and NH53, which was a relief after yesterday's off-roading. GPS still played the hanky by yanking me through a plurality of rurality in the last 50 kms. Since we were approaching the sanctuary from the south,...

It was an effort tearing ourselves away from Chitrakote falls. Like a piece of sticking plaster shifting from finger to finger, we kept putting it off, and finally left at 9.15 am, after breakfast. Morning was definitely chilly, and the sun quite welcome. I drove with my window down, humming like a happy hair-dryer. Since we were going to Bhawanipatna, 250 km away, and quite a random destination with respect to  Chitrakote, we were totally at the mercy of our gps, which it misused to the max, as we shall see. While forests dominated our route once again, there was a fair amount of village-wandering, a result of the carte blanche given to google maps. Towards the end, when NH23 finally stepped in, we had the pleasure of a smooth tarmac running for miles. Otherwise, our wheels mostly dealt with single carriage marked, single carriage unmarked, concrete super-narrow, red-earth super-narrow, and a ford. Yes, you heard that rig...

On some days, we lie on our beds in the evening, energies depleted, but with a silly smile on our faces, for it was a day well spent. We would be driving 275 km today, not too long a distance, yet google-ji was predicting 5.5 hrs. 90% of the run was on NH63, which was mostly very smooth, except perhaps 30 kms of so inside Maharashtra, which was quite bad. Yes my friends, while travelling from Telengana to Chhattisgarh, we passed through the bottom tail of Maharashtra! Naturally, Maha finds no interest in vehicular traffic between Telengana and Chhattisgarh, so to hell with maintaining the roads in that short stretch. Most of the travel today was through forest areas, and really desolate forest areas, where for miles on end we met no other cars, nor people. As we entered Bastar in Chhattisgarh, the forests became deeper, but so did our fears, and we would start seeing scowling militants behind every thicket. Gradually as we approached Jagdalpur (the town near Chitrakote), some signs...