I went where no man has gone before.. heh heh!. Review on Planning a Road Trip

Well this is not exactly about traveling but is somewhat related to it and for those who are that “extra” finicky about the review being on the topic exactly, I suggest you do not read further. In this review, I have described how exactly a road trip should be - IT SHOULD NOT BE PLANNED. Go ahead and read my experience

Okay, so it was I guess somewhere around the 3rd week of March and the colleges were going on and our gang reached the college by around 8:20, the college started at 8:30 that day and I was like “Hey guys, let us do something else and something different today”. And one of my friends was like “You mean bunk”. I said “Dude, I said something different and not something regular”. Loud guffaws everywhere (Us bunch of people will laugh for the corniest jokes). Okay, then one of them suggested that we go for a “long”. “Long” for those who don’t know is a perilous journey taken by college students to satiate their ultimate desire of “chilling out”. Actually, in simpler terms it means a small journey to a place somewhere outside the city. Now the problem was to decide where to go. One said “Balmuri “(a small dam kinda place where you can swim in the water, “na, went there last week”, “Talkad”, kya yaar, we can’t even roam in our undies there, the villagers stare at us” (talkad is historical place with a river side so there are a lot of people over there). Then one of the dudes told Gopalswamy Hills and we were like “Man that is 100 kms away” another one said “another 40 kms and we will reach Bangalore!”…. sounds of grumbling and deep discussion amongst us and in unison we shouted HELL YEAH.

So there were 20 of us, that is almost one third of our class and we took our bikes and filled it with petrol and off we went on a journey of staggering proportions. Guys you have to understand that a 100 kms on a bike is no joke, plus another 100 kms coming back and things get even more serious and of course you also get to brag to your kids when you are a father that you went biking 200 kms! You have to understand what all can happen. First of all there is this possibility of tire punctures, then on course you have another possibility of engine problems and the list continues. So then we all got ready to go to GopalSwamy hills.

The Journey to GopalSwamy - I have a RX100, the Japan make. It is probably the most powerful 2 stroke bike in India. So it was no doubt that I was leading the pack. We all went doubles. 10 bikes and 20 guys. After some 20 kms of driving we stopped for at a place to get some mineral water and cigarettes for some of the guys who smoked and umm, some beer for all of us and we continued our journey again. Well me being the speed king got into a race with other 2 bikers with a CBZ and a shogun and boy did we race, at one point we reached a speed of 120 km/hr! Then after around 90 kms of non-stop bike riding with all our grimy and dirty faces and cheap sunglasses we reached the footsteps of the hills and what do we see there! A Police Check post! Omigod! All that booze and stuff. We take a quick U turn and stop the other guys who were coming behind us. We now contemplate about what do about that booze. Certainly we cannot throw it. That would be an unforgivable deed and we would rot in heaven (?!) for that! So we decide to finish the booze then and there itself. We gulp downed the beer so fast that we could probably be featured in the next kingfisher beer ad. Then in order to avoid detection by the police at the check post we ate chewing gums by the dozen! Then we reached the check post and we had the usual checking of papers and licenses and then got ready for the steep uphill climb.

The hill climb is very very steep. At places it is around 60 degrees inclined. Very rarely would you go above the second gear of the bike. The roads are rather narrow and I doubt it 2 cars can go through at once. I really appreciate the driving skills of the bus driver who actually drives a Bus through these treacherous paths. It took us around 20 minutes to finish these uphill climb.

We were now at the top of the hill! We had reached where no man had ever reached before (heh heh)! There is this temple at the top of the hill, we first went there and thanked the god for letting us reach there without any bikes breaking down or without having any bones broken in spite of those ridiculously high speed we drove at. Then we did a bit of trekking and reached as close as we could reach to the jungle area. You see bandipur is just around 5-10 kms from this place. So we had this another steep incline downwards. So we went there and we luckily had a camera with us. We spotted a few bisons but no elephants but we did see elephant dung. Well that is better than nothing. We then took a few snaps with a few guys climbing on trees and reminding me of our ancestors. We then took some usual group snaps which were the usual corny ones with one guy giving another guy the horns with his 2 fingers but we did not have any “Titanic” pose snaps! Man how I hate that movie!

My Journey back to Mysore - Well our journey back to Mysore was actually at a slower pace. We did not go above 70 km/hr at any point. But we took some pretty awesome snaps. We took a snap of 6 bikes doing wheelie together and then another corny snap of us fooling around with a innocent villager who was taking some firewood to his home. My god, was he shocked by our behavior. Another cool snap of us was of three of our friends lying on the road as if we were going to be hit by a truck; we actually had a truck stop and help us in performing the stunt. Then we stopped at a place on the road to it. It was a local villager joint and 20 of us had a hearty meal and the bill was a meager 380 bucks!

So that was a our journey and I hope you enjoyed read this as much as I enjoyed this journey.