From my journal:
...and then by deserted secondary roads to Aundh, where I'd been told there was accommodation. At the Aundh turnoff, a passerby told me there was no "night-lodge" so I carried on into the night, checking at each village (unsuccessfully) for somewhere to sleep...

...until eventually I joined up with a primary road towards Bijapur. I rode blind (I hadn't planned night riding and didn't have lights), hoping to make it as far as the town of Vita. I couldn't see the road but the trees along either side were a darker shade of black so I could sense rather than see where to go. And what little other traffic there was had lights so I had advance warning of company and could take appropriate evasive action...

...after narrowly avoiding a dog, sleeping on the warm tarmac, which would have launched me into space at high speed, I came to my senses and crawled into a field to sleep...

...strange noises in the surrounding undergrowth were a little unsettling, but I eventually drifted off to sleep, whilst trying to remember whether it is three thousand or thirty thousand people in India who die each year from snakebites...