आditi

Biking Pune-Great Rann of Kutch-Pune Part I: Pune to Dholavira Day 4, November 25 (Wednesday) Dholavira to Hodka (279 km) We left from Dholavira at around 6am. Woke up Rajan from his slumber to switch on the air compressor and top up air in the punctured tyre so that it will last till Rapar, about 100 km where the nearest possible tyre shop would be available to get a new tyre. We rode back on the Khadir bet road..couldn't help stopping for another half hour to take pics there, The White rann where we could actually step inside. And yes, we did taste the salt! Zombied couple We reached Rapar at around 9.30am and found an MRF shop, but he did not have the tyre size. After enquiring in 2-3 more smaller shops, we found it in one place. Though the shop owner claimed it was also a tubeless tyre, we were not sure...so we asked him to also put a tube. Finally, we were done by about 11.30am. We had breakfast of batatawada, dabeli, fafda, jalebi at the tyre shop only. ...

First things first..we went to Great Rann of Kutch and visited Dholavira, Hodka and Dhordo white desert, and Mandvi. This is Part I of the travel diary with details about our ride to Dholavira and the stay there. Links to Part II and III are given at the end of this post. We skipped the Little Rann of Kutch, wild ass sanctuary, Narayan Sarovar, Koteshwar temple, and Lakhpat fort. Day 1, November 22 (Sunday). Pune to Baroda: 552 km As planned, we left from Aundh at around 5.15am. Aai-Baba had come to see us off. Ovee was already told that we are going on bike for a week and she was ready with all the activities she had planned with grandparents. We did not wake her up in the morning...while leaving, we just kissed her on the cheek, whispered to her that she is a very strong and brave baby, and left. We met our biking partners and my cousins -Sukhad and Alka at Jagtap dairy chowk, and left from there at 5.45am. We had to cover a long stretch, so we waited only for breakfast, l...

THE START June 11 -Pune to Vapi (292 kms) We began the ride from Aundh at 7 am. Our friends -Ajay Kolhatkar, Rahul Nagpure, Ketan Pasalkar, Aniket Sawant and my parents had come to see us off. (Read -to make it an emotional departure)  Moms   (from left) Aniket, Ajay, Chaitanya, Ketan, Sagar, Rahul, Tejas and me    And we started the journey...  It was raining heavily all through the day. As we reached Panvel, our bike got punctured because of a five-inch nail. Thankfully it was a tubeless tyre and not much damage was done; although we spent about an hour looking for a puncture wallah to mend it. (We were carrying the puncture kits, but did not want to do it ourselves in the heavy rains). It was about 10.30am when we left from Panvel after which we stopped at 1.30pm at Ghodbunder road for lunch. We were completely wet and the raincoats proved inadequate in the heavy rains. By then, we had gotten used to it and did not care much about the mess. That da...