09-Mar-2003 -- This confluence is just off a fairly large National Highway in U.P., so we figured it would be a quick day trip. I was planning on a 2-hour drive from Delhi, an hour hike, and a 2-hour drive back. Turns out that most of the "highway" was little more than a string of potholes, connected together by dirt. We took the Delhi-Moradabad highway East out of town, turned right at Hapur, and went straight South towards Aligarh. The Lonely Planet road atlas doesn't show it, but there's a diversion around Hapur so that you don't have to cut through the city center. (shown on the GPS-generated map) That would have saved some time -- but the biggest time saver is to avoid Hapur altogether and drive Southeast, turning off the Moradabad hwy just after Ghaziabad. You intersect the Aligarh hwy south of Buhlandshahr, and avoid the worst part of the potholed road.

In any event, we were able to leave Delhi at 7am and return before 3pm, so it is a do-able day trip. It would be less than 2 hours from Mathura, so if anyone else plans on visiting this confluence, I would suggest heading from Delhi to Mathura or Vrindivan, seeing the temples there, spending the night, and then doing a confluence visit from there.

We were planning on a hike of about 3 km, but the highway got even closer to the confluence than it appeared on the map. What's more, when the road became almost perpendicular to the confluence (at less than 3 km away) there was a small, paved farm road headed into the fields directly towards our destination. What a great coincidence!

So we turned off, drove straight towards the confluence, but got stopped at a railroad crossing. We waited about 15 minutes for the train to come, then the guards lifted the block and allowed us to keep going. The road got us within 900 meters of the site, where we parked to continue by foot.

As we left the car, a herd of wild antelope crossed the road just behind us. Like every confluence I've been to in India, this one was in the middle of farm land. With a billion people to feed, it seems that everyplace that isn't city is farmland! The crop being grown here was wheat.

We started walking a zig-zag path towards the confluence, being careful to walk along irrigation mounds and not on top of the fields. As we got closer, we found a hard, dried bed that we could walk over -- either too difficult to irrigate, or it had already been harvested. We headed off across it in a direct line towards the confluence, and found it -- just 5 or 10 meters past the dried-out flat and in the next wheat field past it. On the panoramic photo you can see both the dried-out part (where the antelope were running) and the wheat field (where three curious farmers came up to see what we were doing.)

We quickly took some photos, said hello to the farmers, and then headed back to the car.