Another day . another long drive!

May 16 began with a cup of filter coffee! Hmmmm.

We then visited the Udupi Krishna Math (Devasthan) which is one that was established by Madhwacharya.

Then wed had not-so-piping-hot idlis, dosai etc. And hit the road. This time it was Suphala on the wheel. The odo read 788. It was her luck that she ran into the worst roads (so far) on the trip. There is a lot of road construction in progress in the Mangalore-Surathkal stretch. That unfortunately gave us a slow start. Suphala did a fine job on the wheel ... but it was more like a motor driving school experience for her because of my endless instructions.

We fueled up again at 903 and then it was Monali's turn at the wheel. She did upto the time we had lunch a KTDC hotel (somewhere near kudlu) where we had lunch and our first drink of “padimukhi”, the warm pink colored Kerala medicated drinking water. We hit the road again heading to Kasargod. At 953 on the odo we realized that our speed was getting us nowhere (sorry ladies, you gotta take the back seat!)

Siddharth took over from Monali and he did a 150 kilometers till sundown. Then I switched places with him at around 6:30 pm and went non-stop to our hotel in Tripunithura, Ernakulam. It was just before midnight that we got there. Even though I was using GPS (Destinator and One India map on my HTC TytnII) the place was difficult to find because it is situated in a bye-lane and there aren’t enough signs to guide us there. The other problem of course, is the language … not too many people could understand Hindi or English! It was close to midnight and not too many people on the road and the ones on the road could not make head or tail of what we were asking them. But in the end there was one sushikskit bekaar (as Amit would have called him. Lol) who gave us the right directions to get to Star Apartments. Then their office was closed and we had to call Sam Verghese on his mobile phone and he sent someone to help us check in. Star Apartments in Tripunithura is an apartment cluster consisting of about 20 buildings housing about a thousand apartments. Out of these Star Homes (the company that built these) keep about 50 to 60 apartments and let them out to tourists. Look up www.starhomes.co.in for more information.

End of day 2.