Outside Vapi

Sunday, 9 April 2017

The journey is at least as interesting as the destination. Some of our sights as we traveled to the girls’ hostel.

Typical rural village housing. The round disk at the far right is a very dusty satellite dish. Tata Sky reaches everywhere there’s electricity and is available for less than $5 per month.

India has been making bricks for 4500 years. Here you can see new bricks drying in the sun before being fired in large stacks as seen in the background.

In the US many say that when a business starts, the first item on the agenda is to design the T-shirt, then worry about the product. In India it seems that the first order of business is to build a gate, then consider what comes behind it.

The brand new “Vapi Café”. It’s at least an hour outside of Vapi!

We opted for more traditional cuisine. This was our stop for “ganna ras” (sugar cane juice) -- with a touch of pineapple, lemon, and masala.

Then we stopped at the local “vada pav” stand. It was very busy with both eat-in and take-out. Vada pav is essentially a veggie burger: a fried batter-coated ball of spicy potatoes between the halves of a split dinner roll. And if it’s not spicy enough, you can get fried whole green chilis on the side.

Chicken was not on the menu, but it was on the floor!