27-05-2010

The Day 8 started early for us. We got up by 6:00 AM as we had a long distance to cover ahead of us. Our original plan of reaching Varanasi via Lucknow required us to travel close to 900 KM. I went to get the car from the place we had parked the previous night so that we could load our luggage. I was shocked to see that our car was surrounded by at least 5 cars on all sides. Apparently this is an expected thing in Delhi.

Sreejith and my brother in law, Nitin arrived to help me out and we finally got out of the maze by 7:30. Having been delayed a little we thought we will try to make up for it on the way. Boy, were we wrong on this one. It took us a good 2-2.5 hours just to get out of NCR. Maybe the entire Delhi decided to travel to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal. I can't think of any other reason for the kind of traffic we saw on our way. Anyways, what it ensured was that we would not be able to cover the distance we had earlier imagined.

We decided to skip Lucknow and with that went our dreams, of having Tunde Kebabs and Biryani, in smoke. We then aimed to reach Varanasi by 9 PM. The byepass of Kanpur and Allahabad greatly helped us in achieving this revised target. Both those roads are really good reasons to skip these cities :). The Allahabad by-pass appeared to be a newly constructed road with hardly any traffic.

We reached Varanasi by 8-8:30 PM and stayed in the first hotel of our trip so far. The hotel was booked by my wife, Nitika, just a couple of hours before we arrived. We checked out the lanes around the hotel for some time and had Rabri and Lassi while we were at it. Needless to say, they were both very good. After that we arrived in our Hotel and after a few adventures with the airconditioning of the rooms there, we finally got our well deserved rest.

We would be leaving for Kolkata on Day 9. Hopefully this plan would not have to be delayed for any reason whatsoever.