Table of Contents
In 2010, I rode my Yamaha across India, About 5,500 Kilometers in total. Since then I have been wanting to do more. This year, June 2015, We drove across India. This time we drove a little less than 10,000 kilometres. This page is dedicated to capturing everything about this wonderful trip of ours, which I call EpicDrive.
Initially this started as a quick trip to Leh. The plan was to fly to Delhi and drive from there. But then everything changed. In the changed plan we would drive Bangalore – Leh – Bangalore. But then its a plan. Many things changed as we started driving. The map below shows the exact path we took.
Drive Map
Blogposts
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Daily Report 14 – Day Trip to Pangong Lake
Well it seems you can’t do sightseeing in Leh using taxies from outside J&K. I had an yellow board self drive from Delhi. We werent in mood to fight with the mob and hence we took a taxi to Pangong Lake (Hence these kilometers are not counted). Pangong Lake is beautiful. Pictures here...
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Daily Report 13 – Wandering around Leh
It was supposed to be a lazy day. In fact it started as a lazy day but then we walked a lot, including climbing to the Leh palace to get some spectacular views. Its not surprising that we walked around sixteen kilometers in total today. A day well spent.
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Daily Report 12 – We are in Leh
This was one of the most pleasant drives. The road conditions were great. I could enjoy the surroundings even though I was driving. The weather, the landscape changes for every 20kms drastically. Its probably one of the most beautiful drives. I have at least two thousand pictures from this stretch and lots of...
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Daily Report 11 – Kargil
Sonamarg to Leh is not that far. It’s about 300KMS. If one leaves early one should be able to cover it in a day. Since we were kind of late by a day, I was wondering about covering as much as possible in a day. But it turned out that the check-post gates...
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Daily Report 10 – Sonamarg
We left Patnitop quite early. The drive was beautiful. It took us couple of hours to enter Srinagar due to traffic jam. Also taxi drivers were horrible. We reached Srinagar around 2pm. We still had lot of light hence we though of camping at Sonamarg which is roughly 90kms from Srinagar. Roads to...
Checklists
Checklists are required in order to make sure we carry everything we need. It also stops us from over packing. Some of my checklists are
First Aid Box
First Aid Box checklist has everything that we need for emergency treatments on the road. Of course carry specific medicines that you would take otherwise on daily basis. Also its a good idea to get you first aid box verified by a doctor you trust. My list will probably work as basic list on which you can build.
Contributing to Open Data while travelling
While on travel I will be contributing data or capturing data to contribute later. . All the data are available under some Open License (Odbl, Creative Commons or FOSS license). Some of the projects that I am planning to contribute are
- Map postboxes – #OpenPostBoxIndia project
- Add Point of Interest to OpenStreetMap
- Record paths and upload to OpenStreetMap
- Mozilla Location Service using Mozilla Stumbler
- Mapillary – Crowdsourced Street Level Photos
- Wikimedia/Flickr – Pictures of Interest
- Meet Local Data{Meet} communities if time permits
- Pincode + Postcard Project
Pictures and Videos
- We posted pictures on Instagram as we drove across. After the trip I collected all 477 pictures and posted them as a gallery here. Its fun to see all the pictures in thumbnail size. It gives the glimpse of whole trip in one page. Its like an online poster. Of course you can click on thumbnail to see the details. Enjoy.
Hotels and Restaurants
Hotels and Restaurants that we stayed and ate at. We have tried to rate them as per our liking.| ID | Type | Name | Address | Map | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Resturant | Gesmo | Fort Road, Leh | 34.1607986,77.5768041 | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ | Nice breakfast place. |
| 2 | Resturant | Tibetan Kitchen | Fort Road, Leh | 34.1637,77.5819 | ❤️❤️❤️ | Good Mutton Momos |
| 3 | Resturant | Cafe Bahaar | Basheer Bagh, Hyderabad | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ | Good biriyaani. | |
| 4 | Resturant | Mughal Darbar | Residency Rd, Srinagar | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ | Try Wazwan | |
| 5 | Resturant | Ahdoos | Residency Rd, Srinagar | ❤️❤️❤️❤️ | Tabak Maaz (Kashmiri Fried Lamb Ribs) |
Open Data Contributed
GPX Tracks
GPX Tracks from our travel. Almost every step is captured.Leh/Ladakh Route Guidance – HiVayKing
HiVayKing is a group of Indian Hiways Enthusiasts. We used HiVayKing for the route guidance and instant hotel booking in Leh/Ladakh area. They were prompt, helpful and sweet. Thanks a lot to them that we didn’t have to think about hotels on the way in India’s remotest places. Also they were one messageg away for any kind of help we wanted on the go.
Their Facebook community is very active and helpful. Get an yearly membership if you drive often. For Leh/Ladakh they have a special plan called Ladakh 951. Its a steal considering what you get. I highly recommend them.
OSMAnd
OSMAnd is a global mobile map viewing and navigation app which works both online and offline mode. Whole of India’s map is around 1GB. You can download and add it to the app. Once you do that you don’t need any internet for it to work. We used it extensively for navigation. Its available for both Android and iOS platforms. Its an open source software.
Locus
I have written a really long how-to on Locus app previously. I used along with OSMAnd to plan route and record the route, record POIs, etc. Locus also works in offline mode. I used the same 1GB map file that I downloaded as part OSMAnd for offline maps. Locus can also import and export different types map files1. So its my to go app to share the information with other travelers. All the GPX files on this trip was captured using Locus.
Google Maps
Google maps is still a great tool to do research and navigation.
- All the blog posts related to this road trip are tagged as #epicdrive. Go ahead and check them out.
Footnotes
- KML, GPX etc ↩