04/07/2011
I would like to call this ride as "Ride to the end of the world" ...
As the road we took took is to place where someone did not allow us to go further. Any ways here goes the story.
I oiled my foldie and packed stuffs in the pannier on Friday morning, and decided to work from home. Evening i thought, it may rain so called for cab, which will drop me to the Shantinagar bus-stand, from where the bus was suppose leave by 10pm. My wife diverted my sons attention towards something, and i sneaked out of the house after a light dinner. There i met Suresh for the first time, looked a lil bothered about the weight he was carrying. We waited for sriram to show-up, and he sends an sms, that he is waiting near the bus. We went and met him, loaded our bikes in the bus.
The bus started along with Sriram ;) .. as usual, he kept talking and told the everything happened with in last couple of years. It was 11.30pm and the bus stopped at Mac-D. After so much of listening, i was hungry and went for a small burger, at the same time sriram wanted some more energy to talk more, and he also took a small burger. Sriram wanted to talk/speak more, but i was in no mood.
Woke-up in the morning, at about 6 am and the bus pulled over at the base of the hill, so we had another hour and half before we could reach Kodai. Since we had got the rear seats, it was really uncomfortable in the ghat section.
We reached Kodai at 8.30 and took breakfast in a good restaurant near rhe bus-stand of kodai. The weather was pleasant and sunny, as against weather prediction of rains.
Now the Idea was to reach Mo**ar via Poomparai (Did i misspell it again??) Poondi. We started the ride at 10.30am, and as soon as we hot the Observatory road, we were welcome by a huge and nagging climb of 2kms. Suresh got annoyed of this and called me to inform that he wanted to quit, and we (me and Sriram) can carry on. But it took just a bit of convincing to make him ride further, and after this he never said never again in this ride. We left the civilization and went through numerous view points. It was an awesome route with almost no motorized vehicle on it.
We kept chatting and riding, reached poondi to have our lunch at about 2pm. The food served was soooper hot, but had no choice, so like it and ate the same ;). We started after lunch towards klevare (Did misspell it again??), after we reached a point from where we were suppose to enter the jungle (No-road section), we found a forest guard standing there and waiting for us :)
His name was "Palani Chami", he did not allow us to go in the jungle. We tried almost all options including Br**ing him, and talked to his higher-ups ... and nothing worked.
We were left with no option but to head back, we cursed him to the hell and headed back to poondi, where we expected to get a bus to Kodai. Meanwhile srinath booked 2 rooms for us in the Kodai-club. In poondi we were informed that the bus will start by 6.30 and will take about 3 hours to reach Kodai. That meant, we would not have reached Kodai before 10pm. We were already tired, not only because of the ride but also because of the bus journey. We started to look for alternatives, and we found a lorry/truck going to kodai.
And we had the most horrible ride of my life, this truck reach kodai in 90min, and the bus takes double the time. It was bone-jarring. By the time we reached kodai, i was about to throw-up.
Thanks to Srinath, we had the room where we checked-in and cleaned up and had dinner. Went to bed only by 11.20pm.
Sunday morning, we took it easy and checked-out from the club by 10.30pm. The idea was to reach Coimbatore via palani, as the bus-tickets we had was from Coimbatore to Bangalore, there were no vacancies in the bus leaving to Bangalore from kodai for that evening. We also enquired about the bus to Coimbatore, but there were none. We decided to bike from there to Palani and then find a truck going to Coimbatore. The Downhill ride to Palani was fun, except 5 kms of climb that we encountered. We had about 45 kms of complete downhill, and it was awesome. After we hit the plains, we had lunch and rest we left to Sriram to convince truck-walas to give us lift. Well, it was nice trucking from Palani to Pollachi and pollachi to Coimbatore. We were in a hotel near the bust stand taking our dinner and drink by 7.30 and we had about 2 hours for this. We also cleaned ourselves in the hotels restroom in complete indian-railway STYLE.
9.45pm and we are looking for our bus, at 9.50 we come to know the bust-stand we are looking for is another 7kms from here ... we lost all hopes .. we looked at the ticket again and the bus start time was 10.30. We still had time to catch bus, and we started rushing to new bust-stand, asking for direction from ppl.
And there we were at the bus stop, much before time.
Last minute rush was something that i will never f'get. And Sriram's Silly jokes.
Hil-lights : Planai Chami, The scenic route, The down-hill ride, bone-jarring truck ride, and last minute rush to the bus-stand.
Over-all, it was an awesome trip, but not the way we planned it :)
