Our Travelogue

Both Rohit and I love travelling, but we are particularly fond of road trips. Documenting these trips both visually, monetarily and penning down experiences is all a part of these trips, and so our blog is our travelogue! Rohit has been an avid blogger and has been blogging since 2006. Below is a very brief summary of the four road trips that we’ve been on. Our first road trip to Mandarmani was an adventure of sorts as it was our first road trip together. I planned and planned, but since Rohit had been there before, he seemed quite sure about the route and timelines. We started from Kolkata and drove until Kolaghat, and driving on the super smooth expressway of the Golden Quadrilateral was a pleasure. We turned off from there towards Contai, and while the roads deteriorated marginally, it was still ok until we reached Contai from where the highway became a single lane tarred road! The final stretch was through 14 kms of dirt track through villages until we came upon a “bund”. We then drove along the beach for about 2 kms which was the final stretch until we reached our Hotel. I then realized why Rohit had insisted that we get there before sundown. Firstly, it becomes pitch dark, and we wouldn’t have been able to see anything on the beach, and secondly, once the high tide came in, the harder portion of the beach would be under water, and we wouldn’t be able to reach our Hotel. We spent two days on this virgin beach with rippling waves and red crabs before we headed back to Kolkata. Our second and longest road trip till date was to Orissa. We had wanted to drive off somewhere before summer set in and worked out a plan to go to Orissa. The trip was planned for 6 days and entailed us driving to Puri on Day One and then spending a couple of days there. We bought our ice-case for this trip and ever since have located an ice factory in the most god-forsaken places on our trips, just to keep our drinks cold! After two days in Puri enjoying the sun, sand and food, we headed to Gopalpur. On the way we first went to Konark to see the famous Sun Temple, and then to the Chilka Lake where we spent over three hours on a boat traversing the lake which is a famous bird sanctuary, as well as home to the Irrawady dolphins. We then headed to Gopalpur where we spent a day before heading back to Kolkata. On the way back we stopped at Bhubaneswar where we spent some time at Nandankanan ( a zoo cum wildlife sanctuary where we saw some lovely white tigers! ), and the Udaygiri and Khandigiri Caves. After that trip, we used a long weekend to go to another virgin white sand beach in West Bengal called Bakkhali. This is where the Sunderbans start from. The unique thing about this beach destination is that they have not allowed any of the resorts and hotels to be on the beach. And we loved the trip to the beach every day on the local “van”! The interesting part about this trip was that to get there, at a certain point along the way, the car needed to be loaded onto a ferry, which then took us across a river to the other side from where we drove the last hour or so to get to Bakkhali. We also saw something in Bakkhali we hadn’t seen for a long time – windmills! Our most recent road trip was to Ranchi for a friend’s wedding, which we decided to do by road. We could have taken the easy way out and gone by train / flight, but we just needed an excuse for another road trip! We did enough research before going, to make the trip worthwhile. The drive through the Chota Nagpur Plateau made for a picturesque journey. We managed to check out the famous Dasham Falls and believe it or not, two chameleons engaged in battle (we guessed) in the middle of the forest road. Its moments like these that we thirst for on our journey. Our love for travel and road trips are well documented on Rohit’s blog : http://turquoisechill.blogspot.com/search/label/Trips Have a look, and you’ll get to see how we encompass the entire experience right from the car to the terrain, vegetation, architecture, food and people.