A Scramble Across Bihar . . .

Emmanuel Hospital Association, of which NJH is a unit has it's governing body meetings twice in a year had decided to have the Regional Administrative Council for 2012 of the Eastern Region in the Madhepura Christian Hospital, Madhepura, Bihar. For us, it was an opportunity to travel across this part of the country by road. The reason being that train travel would mean that it would take at least 30 hours to reach Madhepura from NJH, whereas a rough calculation told us that it should not take more than 20 hours if we were to travel by jeep. 

We calculated all the kilometers and the route. The google maps told us that it's going to be 565 kilometres. According to google it should take us only 10 hours. But, considering our previous experiences, we estimated 15 hours on the road.

The time of departure from hospital was fixed at 4:00 am on November 5th. And we were all out of the hospital by 3:50 am. 

Dinesh with the vehicle

The team, Dinesh, Majerus and Vandana

Muddy roads from Daltonganj . . .

Progressing on to potholes . . .

And then to larger ones . . . The rains only made it worse . . . 

Some places, it became like small ponds . . . 

Beside the road, the scenery was breathtaking . . .  

Inside Hariharganj town . . .

Relief as we left Jharkhand. We expected better roads and we were rewarded . . . 

Bihar welcomed us . . .  

The GT road at Aurangabad . . .

The GT Road towards Delhi . . . 

I dozed off for most of the time between Aurangabad and Patna. Then, we got into the traffic jam within Patna which delayed us by almost 2 hours.

On the Mahatma Gandhi Setu over the river Ganges

Policemen patrolling the bridge. 

The famous Hajipur bananas along the banks of the Ganges . . . 

The road from Patna to Muzaffarpur was a mess. The 75 kilometer stretch took us more than 2 hours. To make matters worse, there was poor road signs except in the highways.

Muzaffarpur . . .  

 After the snail pace progress till Muzaffarpur, we were relived to see the brand new highway from Muzaffarpur to Purulia. It happened that the construction of the highway was still in progress. Thankfully, the work was over till the place where we had to make the turning towards Madhepura. 

The brand new Muzaffarpur-Purnia highway

Typical rural India on the 4 lane highway . . . 

Guesses on what this is? 

Well, we drove into the Madhepura Christian Hospital campus sharp at 8:00 pm. It had taken us 16 hours totally. If we excluded the time spend for breakfast and lunch, that was what we had calculated. It has been an exhilarating experience for the team. More on Madhepura Christian Hospital in the next blog . . .