Day 38 - 42: Kolkata & Burdwan

Kolkata was the city where the monsoons finally caught up with the GICR team. When it rained it poured and when it didn't it steamed! It is probably the only city where one can sweat while showering!!! But on the other hand, this city has the best food to offer compared to any other city in India. And it is cheap, food or anything else you want is cheap, for a Delhite most things are pocket change. The city appears to be caught in a time warp. The prices, trams, hand pulled rickshaws and ambassadors take you back in time. It is a wonderful feeling to time travel, till the traffic hits, where you need a lot of time to travel! Distances are not measured in kilometres but in minutes and those minutes are dependent on the time of the day. Getting around the city is an art and one needs the help of the experts!

And we had these experts who were human location devices, meeting us before Calcutta at guiding us through the extremely crazy traffic from the southern part of the city to Salt Lake via Dum Dum Airport. Shankar and his boys from Burdwan rode down to Kolaghat and all the way back just to make sure we didn't get lost. Even then entering Cal took a couple of hours and we were a tired bunch of bikers who entered the hotel.

Time in Calcutta was spent exploring the very wide cuisine available. And every bit of it extremely delicious. From Shorsha Maach, Doi Maach to Rossa Gollas and roadside fried rice and mutton kathi rolls, we had it all. But the people of Cal are very sweet and when the bikers came to the hotel to visit us, they never came empty handed. Everybody brought at least 2 boxes of sweets and we surely gained a couple of kilos hogging on the sandesh, mishti doi, rossa gollas and a lot more. The first evening saw Subhankar and Niladri bring in sweets, then we had Anirban bring in more sweets and we finally had Parikshit kill us all with even more mithai. And as we were reeling under the pressure of lack of insulin, Pranjal brings in some more Mishti Doi to finish us off completely!

But thanks to the rains and the football spirit of Calcutta we got to work off some of our flab as we headed out to the park in front of the hotel for a game of football with some local school kids. They were kind enough to allow us to play and we had a rollicking time playing football just for kicks! Though it didn't help, with a lot more food sent down the hatch, we were just placating our guilty conscience of having done a spot of exercise!

We did attempt visiting some of the iconic structures of this magnificent city, but unfortunately due to the traffic and water logged roads, we didn't get very far and spent most of our time going round in circles, behind trams, buses and ambassadors! A few pictures of the GICR team roaming around the city of Calcutta.




The Evoque stuck in Bengal traffic


Slowing the Tram Down!




Only in India do you get trucks moving in both directions on the same bit of tarmac


The football field seflie!


World Cup special

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