What a day. Had no sleep last night because my sleep cycle was out of order once again. Left around 9.30am anyway. When checking out, the manager asked for a ‘coin from your country’, found him a spare Euro in my backpack. After 20km of cycling I was so done that I’d have loved to stay somewhere. Instead I started nibbling on some dry noodles. Awesome. After 4 more kilometers I stopped at a restaurant (more on that below) and had the worst lunch I’ve had in India so far. But it was food and that helped me get back on track.<\/p>\n
Reached Ankleshwara and had some teas and amazing lassis in the poshest hotel (more on that below) I’ve seen here so far. I decided to go another 9 or so kilometers to Bharuch. At some point two guys on a motorcycled slowed down next to me and started asking the usual questions, where from, where to, etc. Instead of naming some random city I said I’d be going to the next hotel. One of the guys said the next one would be 15km away. I got a bit worried about me actually managing to cycle that far and accidentally let out the F word. He seemed to have some pity with me and offered 10km. That sounded better and I wondered if I could get him down to 5 if I haggeled hard enough. Not 5 minutes after they’d left another motorcycle pulled over. Same questions, same answers. Only this time I got him down to 3km. It were actually 4 in the end, but I’m not mad at him for that little offset.<\/p>\n
Got a room, took an autorickshaw to the city center of Bharuch. Found the contact lenses stuff I needed and chatted a bit with the guys in that optician studio shop thingie. Ended up buying myself new glasses, too. 24 Europe-bucks for a flexible frame and proper lenses, all done within roughly 1 hour. Hard to say no.<\/p>\n
On hotels and hotels, and guesthouses and guesthouses. So far I got along quite well with the fact that hotels are not always hotels. Over here, a hotel can be either a hotel (rooms and all that) or a restaurant. It’s the same in Madagascar, by the way, and more than once did I find myself asking for a room in a restaurant. Now, so far the add-on ‘guesthouse’ was a pretty good indicator that this was actually a hotel in the ‘western’ sense of the word (please correct me if this kind of confusion happens elsewhere, too). Not anymore. A ‘hotel & guesthouse’ may also just be a restaurant.<\/p>\n
![\"Indian](\"https:\/\/onmytodd.org\/wp-uploads\/2011\/03\/IMG_1130.jpg\")
Indian extremes<\/span><\/span><\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a day. Had no sleep last night because my sleep cycle was out of order once again. Left around 9.30am anyway. When checking out, the manager asked for a ‘coin from your country’, found him a spare Euro in … Continue reading