Travel Day 898 – Puri, Bhubaneshwar and Visakhapatnam, INDIA
Even if Puri was slowly growing on us, we still found ourselves pressed on time and with only few train options available we opted for an early start of this Active Travel Day…
Early Morning Train in Puri, India
The only train ticket we could get out of Puri was an 8.30am train to Visakhapatnam, which meant we had to get up at 5.00am and catch the 6.30 train to Bhubaneshwar. Obviously this wasn’t really our preferred hour to rise, but on the other hand it was cool, quiet and empty outside. Only getting a rickshaw to the train station for a decent price was a bit of an issue, but at this early hour we didn’t really have much ground to bargain and we were happy to reach our train on time…
On the bright side, the coffee guy at the train station was already in business and so we found ourselves with just enough time to buy some breakfast and hop on the first train. Unfortunately the local train did not make the journey in the promised 1 ½ hours and it rather took us 2 hours, which meant for us that we had to run as fast as we possibly could with our heavy backpacks to reach the connecting train to Visakhapatnam…
But in the end all worked out well and we could enjoy the long day on the train while watching the nice landscape of Andhra Pradesh fly by the window. It was almost amazing how much the scenery had changed since we left Kolkata, but for hours it seemed we saw nothing but empty fields and palm trees. Everything seemed rather idyllic and only the fact that constantly all garbage was thrown out of the window seemed like a nuisance…
Landscape of Andhra Pradesh, India
Actually it was rather a problem than anything else, but there was not much we could actually do about it since even the train stations had no garbage cans. Even if we carefully kept all our waste on the side, eventually it was just thrown by someone on the tracks who could get a hand on it…
Anyway, arriving in Visakhapatnam left us with two choices only: We could either stay for cheap around the train station or spend more money to be in the expensive beach area. After a short look at what was available on the cheap side, we realized that spending a bit more money here would go a long way and so in the end we ended at an expensive place for us, but at the most affordable option at the lovely ocean front… : )
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