Pune to Puri - Bike Trip: Day 3

The next day we had to catch Cuttack; not too far, so we had time to visit the Hirakud dam. An awesome sight, the dam! The slues gates and the gurgling water was an awesome (yes, again) sight!

The Hirakud dam is about 15 kms away from Sambalpur, the road is pretty easy to find from the main road! The booking office for the dam is about one-and-a-half before the dam. Its near a Shiv-temple, quite miss-able. As you approach the dam, you can ask the rickshaw drivers or the tourist drivers for directions.

There is "No Photography" at the dam so we too, did NOT ;) :D take any photographs near the dam!

Note: In Sambalpur we managed to get a Bajaj Service center open on Sunday, which was a very good ting for us, as Amod's bike had a nut missing in the fork (or something ... don't remember the details)

The road to Cuttack was very scenic and we were also taking it easy as we had only about 320 kms to travel. The road story was pretty much same till Cuttack; bad roads near villages, excellent otherwise.

The villages along this road are much farther apart from each other than what we had seen so far. The in-between roads are also quite desolate. We were able to make it to the outskirts of
Cuttack by 16:00 hours.

The roads outside Cuttack are very bad. Entering Cuttack we saw the Mahanadi the second time, one bridge across the river as one-and-a-half kilometers wide ... Whew!!!

The pictures of the trip have been uploaded at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shantanu.gadgil/Pune2Puri