Smooth sailing from Bhubaneswar to Visakhapatnam #28States28Plates

After quite a few days of drives that were longer than 10 hours, we finally had a relatively easy day ahead of us. Bhubaneswar to Visakhapatnam. The journey isn’t particularly short in terms of time, about eight hours or so, but the highway was brilliant and our lunch stop had some lip-smacking food!

We started out fairly early from Bhubaneswar, primarily so we could take a detour and shoot at the Chilika Lake on the way. And we had woken up with quite an appetite. We were travelling on NH16 again, the same highway that got us to Bhubaneswar from Kolkata, and since it is a popular route there were plenty of hotels along the way where we could stop for breakfast. But one thing they all had in common was that they were all shut. We weren’t sure if it was just the fact that it was before 8am or that it was Independence Day — wishing you a very happy one at that. Soon though we found a small stall selling idli, vada and upma and decided to eat there, a good decision that was. The food was hot, fresh and really tasty which explained the line of people waiting for their orders. After breakfast, we continued toward Chilka Lake which is a detour of about 20-30 minutes from NH16.

Once we reached the lake, we found it to be a bit crowded for our shoot, but a little exploring led us to a narrow dirt trail that was perfect to get some shots with the lake in the back. After the shoot was done, we continued on our way to Vishakapatnam and the rest of the journey, unlike so many of the others before it, went like clockwork. NH16 is an absolutely wonderful highway that only gets better as you cross into Andhra Pradesh. The road surface is excellent and lacks potholes, plus the traffic isn’t too dense either. We stopped for lunch at a roadside dhaba, ate some dal tadka and (delicious) egg keema with more rotis than we’d like to mention and marched on toward Visakhapatnam.

The heavens opened briefly a couple of times during the drive, and both times there was strong rain but it didn’t last very long and we were actually reducing our ETA fairly easily. Just before we entered the city we stopped at one of the many Tea Time shops on the roadside which offer a surprisingly large amount of variety of teas, and then drove till oru night halt — Keys Select Visakhapatnam. Of course, like the other Lemon Tree Hotel brands, Keys Select is also on-point with its hospitality and hygiene and we ate a simple, but yummy dinner in the comfort of our rooms. Tomorrow we have a rather easy drive ahead of us to Vijayawada.