India: Devi river

Started at Billipada and ended at Nuagar, some thing like 22km. Hired my friend Shiva to drive us out the village roads, rough trip, the roads were terrible, but the rural villages were sweet, very beautiful. I had no idea an auto rickshaw was such an off road vehicle. I’m pretty sure some of the locals had not seen a foreigner for some time or ever, haha. We camped on the up river side of the bridge then put in at around 9:30am, finished at around 4:30pm, slow paddling. I also forgot to bring my air bag so for the first time we had to blow up the raft, it worked but man a real workout for the lungs, but I am glad that it is an option with the system.
I was really impressed with the raft on this trip, I took a friend from France with me, we sat in the Youkon facing each other and I had a full backpack tied down to the bow and we were good to go. The weather was terrible, head wind and cross winds, the chop was breaking over the bow so we were fully wet, had to stop 6 maybe 7 times to bail out but other than that the boat still paddled well with 2 ppl in it and full of water, I was worried the floor would blow out but it didn’t, amazing! Slow going the whole way and some rather challenging paddling at the end near Nuagar, there are 2 other rivers and the ocean, so we were fighting an incoming tide as well as the stir from the other 2 rivers, the boat wanted to just turn to the left and stay that way, impossible to track straight. Anyways we reached the take out and washed off in the village and had a beer, then caught an auto rickshaw back to Konark. All together the cost of transportation was $18 amazing!!!
Side note: It was rather nice to get back from this trip to discover yet another Orissa news paper with mine and Yogis photos, as well as a very attractive dentist I know, sitting in the Alpacka, I have never been in so many news papers before, HA!

here is the section we paddled:
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=20.0194842&lon=86.310997&z=12&l=0&m=b

Chiki with the newspaper:

Newspaper close up:

Nora on the Devi: