Every road trip, is meant to be a learning experience. You are supposed to go out there on your own in your car or bike and make your way without any help or guidance. For this, you have to prepare, plan and most importantly make an estimate of the amount of effort and time needed to complete various phases of the trip. While making these estimations, one has to keep in mind that after all, the trip is meant to be an entertaining and safe experience and thus is supposed to be limited to area and activities which are not mentally and physically overly demanding.
However, at time we err. We err in our estimations, our planning and preparation. We err because we don’t estimate and anticipate the magnitude of difficulty that the route may present us with. I also erred in my last trip to Bhutan. I under estimated a certain part of the route. This was the part which is geographically called, the state of Bihar.
We planned to take the NH 57 through Bihar. Its a national highway and the distance, as seen on the map seems easily coverable in one day. I knew that the roads would be bad, the conditions would be bit tough, I totally, completely, foolishly under estimated Bihar. We had estimated that we would cover the distance, which was around 400 km, through Bihar, in 10 hours. The average speed was to be 40 km per hour, which is as low as it can get. This was the average speed that we had when we crossed Ladakh, which are known to be the toughest roads in India.
However, it took us 15 hours to cross half this distance. that makes it an average speed of 13.3 kmph and believe me, we are going as fast as we could on those roads!
We crossed half of Bihar and then finally lost our patience, our courage, our determination and took a detour into Nepal, which is not supposed to be safe. But at that time, we thought that even Nepal would be better than Bihar. We were in a car registered in India, we had no passport, we got into Nepal through an entry gate which is rarely used and worst of all, we had no legal entry permit. But we drove into Nepal because crossing Bihar was IMPOSSIBLE. The roads to unimaginably bad. I am good writer, know the English language reasonably well, but I just don’t have words describe road conditions, the people, the environment, the everything of that place. In fact, while I was there I thought I was in Afghanistan. The situation is really that bad.
Well, here some pictures of the NH 57. The last picture is very important. It depicts the final problem that we faced in Bihar, that made me LOOSE courage. Will describe it once you have seen it.
And this is Last one

What you see in the last picture is a boat. The only way to cross rivers here is to keep you car on boats like these, pay the guy Rs.300, so that they push the boat to the other bank. My car was too big to get one the boat and there were two river like this one which had to be crossed by road and it takes roughly 45 minutes to cross river. All of this made me lose completely to what I called Impossible Bihar. That was when we found and took a detour into Nepal, which was 40 km from where we were. Those 40 km took 2 hours to cross, but we crossed over to a much better road, which got us 500 km by the night.