We started early today to avoid the heat and get a head start on the bad roads. The amazing chef at our hotel made us some kind of fermented pancake slathered with ghee and spices. It was really good and great energy food.
Surprisingly, the roads were the best that we’ve had for the whole trip. Still worse than any European roads, maybe on par with Albania. As always, they varied from freshly paved to almost gravel.
Traffic was almost non-existent though. It was a very quiet ride down the coastal roads with a lot of climbing and some spectacular views.
I found a coastal road on OpenStreetMaps that was listed as “unpaved” but saved us a bit of climbing and about 10 kilometers. Given how bad the paved roads have been, though, we were a little reluctant to try it out. We waited until the turnoff and decided to give the dirt road a try. At first it was actually quite nice, going by fancier hotels and beaches, but quickly it became an under-construction road with just a bed of gravel and 10% grades. We had to walk some of it, and at the end, the road turned into a path so narrow that we had to go single file along with a few other pedestrians and motorcycles. I think it was worth it to go the road less traveled, but Steve was upset about his butt hurting from all the bumps. But we did get to see some water buffalo swimming in a stream! (Plus lots of cows… There are cows everywhere if you haven’t gotten that by now. We may even stop talking about them. They’re like pigeons in New York City; everyone ignores them except the tourists.)
We rode through an actual working fishing village. Small ocean-front and ocean-view homes, not for holidays, but for sleeping after a hard day work on the boat. Women selling fresh fish on the main street and drying fish skins for something. After seeing many Greek fishing villages that are more tourist spots than fishing spots, it was really interesting to see a place like this with 0 tourists (well, I guess there were two!).
Not wanting to make the mistake of skipping lunch before the ferry, we stopped in the tiny ferry town of Dabhol and found a snacks vendor with a couple tables behind the desk and some photos of plates of food with Marathi letters next to them. We hopefully asked, “thali?”, and they motioned us to sit down. While eating, we were entertained by a toddler crawling around and tugging on our shorts and a gentleman who sat down beside us and spoke a few words of English and wanted to know about our trip.
The ferry was easy, once we found it, and on the other side the road surface immediately got better, and the area started to look more upscale. And, our Airtel service started working again, kind of!
I found a hotel with good reviews online in Guhagar and showed up at the door and asked to see some rooms. The one English speaking guy said he’s a cyclist himself and was glad to have us and gave us his locked storage room to keep our bikes along with his. He also said we just missed another group of cyclists 2 days ago, riding the Tour of Deccan. Indeed, we had seen “TOD” painted on the road, and I remember reading about this on another cycling blog. I googled it, hoping we might catch up with them, but they’d just gotten to Goa, finishing their tour that day.
We walked around town and tried to find a SIM card with a different company, but no one had them. So we took a walk on the nice beach, where kids were riding camels and families riding horse drawn buggies back and forth along the beach, then ate a nice vegetarian thali for dinner and went to bed.