Coast to Coast 2021: Lakhpat to Morbi

The tour, personally for me, was starting from today. I woke up before sunrise around 6am and got ready. It didn’t take much long for me to pack since most of the items from the saddle bags were not taken out. I planned to reach Dwarka today. It was just a marker I put on the map just to check for myself whether I will be able to reach or not. By looking at the atlas page, it seemed possible.

The people at the Gurdwara, gave me a some toast and tea following which I went on to see the Gurudwara from the inside. My first time entering into a Sikh holy place.

It was great, visiting a holy place of importance since it was very old and protected under Gujarat Heritage sites act. I felt good having able to see such a prominent site. After taking the ‘Prasad’ offered by the caretaker, I left the place around 9 am.

The roads were single lane ones, with most of the stretches in good condition. My next stop was to visit the Koteshwar Mandir followed by the Narayan Sarovar lake. One of the 5 sacred lakes of India as per the puranic Vedic texts. Most people regard Koteshwar as the most extreme western most point of India.

I wanted to take the lord’s blessings before the start of the ride and hence I had planned to visit this temple, very well known in Gujarat and around. After spending some time around seeing the views and clicking pictures, I headed for Narayan Sarovar lake.

At around 10:30am, I left Koteshwar and was on my way towards Dwarka taking the coastal route. Before the start, I had marked the villages on the atlas page which were helping me now to navigate. Reaching out to Google Maps was a NO-NO.

I was running low on fuel and the indication marker was lit. I had completely forgotten about looking for a petrol bunk. As a matter of fact, I had not spot even a single one even while coming towards Lakhpat from Bhuj. There was no chance of finding a bunk ahead as I was riding through deep village roads. When asked around, people said that the next bunk was 100 kms ahead on the main NH highway. They assured me that normal grocery stores stock up petrol supplies in bottles which really gave me a breather.

After the petrol debacle, I was also running low on cash and for that matter, had to look out for ATM’s so that my journey ahead would become smooth. I doubted, whether Cards/ Gpay/Paytm would be of much use here.

Taking the roads close to the coast had more disadvantages than advantages. The roads were narrow and often the road quality was not upto the mark. Also, being a port area, there was huge traffic of heavy vehicles.

Dwarka, was not even being seen on the distance boards. The next big city was Morbi which was still 100kms more. After crossing Gandhidham, I reached Maliya where I took a break of tea and had some snacks. The lunch had been skipped.

Just as it got dark and I was few kms away from Morbi, the bike refused to start after refueling up. This was my first breakdown of the trip. A blown fuse! The conclusion was reached after figuring out the issue for quite some time as well as phoning my service guys. For the first time in the history of the bike, a fuse had been blown. The exact reason could not be found and since I had a spare one, I didn’t pay heed to the cause of it.

The time was around 8:30 pm and by now, it was decided that Morbi would be the resting place for today.

I decided to again search for a Gurudwara here, just like yesterday, since my stay in this city was totally unplanned. To my luck, I found one but it did not have rooms for people to stay. With that, began my journey of finding my first hotel of the trip. Google was accessed and after traversing the same road many times and visiting 2-3 hotels, finally, it was decided that I would be staying in HOTEL JK. Earlier, I rejected this hotel since it had only 1 vacancy and that too in a shared dorm but after finding that most of the good hotels in the city are booked, I had to retrace my steps back here.

Since, it was only matter of few hours, I took the offer. It was indeed a good one. 150rs for the night. Perfect deal for a budget traveler like me. The only thing that was to be neatly arranged was my luggage since the dorm was open and right opposite to the hotel counter.

By the time everything was settled, it was around 10 pm following which I had dinner at their restaurant below. I was way long from my day’s target of Dwarka. Dwarka, from Morbi is close to around 250 kms, which was a long way to go and so, to cover up the distance, I decided to start early the next morning.

As per my original plan, I was supposed to reach Bhavnagar. But, looking at the deficit now, that was not achievable since I was going to spend some time exploring around Dwarka. So the next viable place for me to rest tomorrow was Porbandar.

I decided to inform Milan (my ex-company friend from Porbandar whose marriage I had attended in 2017 in Porbandar itself ) about my travel plans so that some thing could be figured out.

I slept around 11 pm and put an alarm for 5 am. I really wanted the head-start tomorrow and try to cover as much distance till dusk and see where I could reach.