A different day today; We rode our bikes 55km and then got in the buses for the rest of the ride. This was necessary because we were crossing a national park / animal reserve, and last year the trip leader suffered serious injury from an elephant in a similar park.
The bike ride was through typical rural country, but it was Saturday, so the villages seemed busier than usual. We also encountered an unusual number of bullock carts coming towards us; they weren't loaded, and they weren't decorated, so no apparent reason for the traffic, but it reminded me how much rural Indians use traditional methods in their rural work and living to keep their costs down. I feel this is why there are a lot of people on the land, the villages are full of people of all ages, and we seldom see abandoned fields, like you do in so many other developing countries.
In the bus, we rode for some 50k through uninhabited forested hills in the park, with more typical rural areas on either side.
Erode is a busy town. Our hotel shares a side street with several other hotels. We tried to go out for a walk, but found that the bigger streets are taken over by the traffic. There are no sidewalks, and there is no room to walk safely between the parked vehicles and the traffic. The city planners have coped with this by making all the adjacent residential streets dead ends, and therefore not attractive to through traffic.
So... a good time to do some reading ....
No comments:
Post a Comment