One of the challenges of any multi week bike trip is trying figure how to splice it up… where you will stop each night. For us, we wanted to find towns that were big enough to have a few accommodation options, while keeping the mileage reasonable, but also making the right amount of progress to reach our endpoint on time. And of course you need to listen to your body and hope to not have any mechanicals or health problems. But we’re also trying to see some neat stuff along the way.

Today this meant being on the highway for a couple of hours to reach our destination early enough to be able to hit some caves we wanted to check out. Cycling on the highways here is really not as bad as it sounds. First off… we were definitely not the only cyclists on it, there are many. There were also cows, dogs, people, motorcycles, scooters, tuktuks, and of course the occasional car going the opposite direction in the shoulder. Of the three lanes in each direction, the one next to the shoulder is mostly just bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, and tuktuks. Don’t get me wrong… I’d much rather be pedaling through quiet villages, but in the grand scheme of things, Indian highways are not as bad as they could be.

After about 2 hours, we had a great little breakfast stop in Chhatia… two rounds of samosas and another thing that was kinda sweet but maybe had a tiny amount of meat inside? Not really sure, but it was delicious and the owners took great care of us.

We arrived at our destination before noon, which was great as it gave us plenty of time to shower, eat, and head to Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves which were built around 1 B.C. and are believed to have been carved out as residential blocks for Jaina monks.

A few observations about hotels here

- Most are locked at night, but there will be someone (or several people) sleeping in the lobby to let you out

- Toilet paper has been rare. When we asked for it at our last hotel, we got some newspaper

- There are 3x more light switches than powered items in your room. The room we are in tonight has nineteen light switches.