Hello from Bhopal....

yes, home of the Union Carbide disaster, but it's actually a decent town :) It has been a long, hard road to get here, though....we are back in Madaya Pradesh and we told you their roads were pretty terrible last time we were here :) We are riding some of the same roads again, but this time it all looks different - much greener!

We had a really nice time in Chittor - checked out the ruins and stayed in a nice tourist accomodation type place and had our first home cooked meal! It was delicious!!!!!! The guy that manages the place said he would arrange a thali for our dinner...little did we know that we would basically be eating with the family. We were up and out the next morning on the road to Sanchi...and we had over 100kms of road construction! It is the same road (NH-76) that we used to get to Udaipur and it seems the whole of NH-76 is being upgraded from it's one lane incarnation to the 4 lane monstrosity. We have been told that it is a national highway project - they want and east-west expressway in this area and this is the chosen route. We ended up in Jhalawar in a nice Rajasthan Tourist Corp. hotel feeling like we had done some hard miles and not feeling like we had much to show for it.

A fabulous hot shower and good nights sleep later, we woke up refreshed and filled up on some of the best butter toast we have had and hit the road. We rolled in to Bhopal this afternoon feeling pretty good after having fought the roads for half the day (why Madaya Pradesh decided to pave alternating kilometers we will never know - it was one km of pristine pavement alternated with a km of single lane, pot holed, gravelly, lumpy bumpy...road. It went on for far too long...and then the road was sweet!!!! So we ripped it up and felt a lot more productive.

Tomorrow we head to Sanchi to see the Buddhist ruins and then we have had a slight change in plans and we are going to head north to Gwailor and on to Agra (Taj Mahal here we come :) and then get back into Rajasthan to our camel safari :)

Time for bed! We have to get an early start - it's 50kms from Bhopal to Sanchi and we want to beat the crowds :) Goodnight!!!