~shree
14Aug/071

Tour de Coorg

Seven of us are going on a 5 day tour of Kodagu district - basically Madikeri and places around it. We will be meeting at 8:45 PM at Majestic, and catch a bus to Somwarpet (in Coorg) - our cycles go with us. After that we spend five days riding around. We intend to leave Coorg on Sunday night. The rain god seems to be showing us some mercy, after the downpour that sent Jog falls to everyone's inboxes 🙂

Day 3

Update: 11:45pm Reached Virajpet at 9:45pm riding in the dark. The weather today was just too good. It drizzled for some time in the afternoon. We faced the hot sun for a relatively short time. But we reached Kakkabbe at about 3.(I just dozed off while writing this and woke up at six. Abhinandan woke me up to say that he is outside the hotel. By the way, he is rejoining the tour which is very good indeed.) Coming back to the story. Next we went to the Padi Igguta temple - after a short uphill climb. Iggutappa and Cauvery are the gods of Coorg. Unfortunately the temple was being renovated. So back we came to Kakkabbe, had tea. At this point somebody suggested us Chelavara falls. We decided to go to the falls. Sorry the text box has run out!

Update: 11:20am Just returned from Talacauvery. A nice uphill slope for 8km, fantastic weather, even better view of the surroundings. Very pleasant ride indeed! Coorg honey and jam made for a great combination. We quickly went to the temple, climbed up the hill and came back. This was the highest point in our journey till now. The ride downhill was even better. 11 plates of 'pundi' at the hotel completed the experience. Checked out of the hotel just now. Off to Kakkabbe.

Update: 6:00am I was so sleepy yesterday night that i just dozed off. Had forgotten to mention a few thing. We are staying at KSTDC. Good rooms. Bad food. Relatively expensive. And there is this police station next door. They had quite a few questions for up yesterday 🙂 we plan to climb up to Talacauveri next. It is the starting point of the river kaveri. A good 8km climb.

Day 2

Update: 10:00pm We reached Bhagamandala at 6:30. It was a pleasant ride - there was every hint of impending rain but it never came. We benefited at times since the clouds shielded us from the sun for quite some time.The road was downhill for a long time - and we lost much altitude. The constant theme for the afternoon was paddy fields with mountains in the background. So we will have some fun tomorrow. slightly more than 150km for the entire tour at this point.

Update: 2:10pm We just reached Madikeri. Abhinandan had found the going difficult yesterday and wants to join up later in the tour if possible. So that reduced the size of the company to six. We had an excellent ride amidst greenery to Abbi falls. A few uphill sides too 🙂 The falls was full of water. The weather has been anything but rainy, actually quite sunny. We had the first incident of the tour too - Gowrish lost control on the last descent to Abbi and had a bad fall. Fortunately its not too bad - he has escaped with a few scratches and skin scrapes on the face.
Total distance till now - 118km. We intend to reach Bhagamandala by evening.

Day 1

Update: 5:30pm We reached my uncles house an hour earlier. About 80km of riding happened today. One highlight was the long descent from Somwarpet. We are relaxing after coffee for now.

Update: 1:30pm reached Somwarpet and rushed into Ganesh Darshini for lunch. 56km travelled till here. The last few km were mostly uphill. No sign of rain - instead we have bright sunshine. This change in weather happened yesterday here -and is the official reason for non avialability of juice, ice cream, etc. Four of the riders are half asleep after lunch ! We will be staying at my uncles house about 25km from here, nobody is in a hurry .

Update: 10:30am caught the two "leaders" finally -they were waiting for us in Shanivarasante. Many nice views of paddy fields along th way. Next stop Somvarpet.

Update: Its 8:30am and we have reached Kodlipet after a ride of 24km. Only the last six km was good road. But we are now in coorg and after this all roads are good, or so the locals claim. Gowrish and Avinash have good way ahead and we are have stopped for breakfast. Their mobiles brent reachable and we hope to catch them in Somwapet. Mean while, everybody enjoyed the views of the hemavathy river.

Update: We have changed plans already! We could not arrange transport for our cycles to Somwarpet, so we made a flash decision to start near Sakleshpur. The bus has dropped us Ballupet - about 8 km from Sakleshpur. Ballupet is in Hassan district. The road from here is bad for about 15km (the locals say). Prasad has a 25 year old cycle - a Puegot with thin tyres. So we have decided to play it safe and wait till daylight before we start. I see the kaka shop opening - so passing time should not be a problem 🙂 By the way, it is 4:30am now. We will start towards coorg in just over an hours time.

Currently confirmed riders are : Avinash, Prasad, Abhinandan, Gauthaman, Gourish, KP and Me. As we ride along, you might see the hills that we climb below (it will basically be the altitude profile of our route).

Current Status of the ride

PS1: If it's all blue, then you are looking at the sky and we haven't started !

PS2: I intend to update this graph from my mobile phone (with GPRS), so no guarantees 🙂

24Jan/073

All content from “Tour of North East” is online!

At last 🙂 By "content", I mean - Pictures, GPS tracks and Stories. For more details, please click here.

Enjoy!

10May/068

Pedalathon!

A group of crazy people belonging to Bangalore and Chennai had been cooking up the idea of a pedalathon. Their plan was to do Bangalore - Chennai on their cycles in 2 days. The finalised route was over Chittoor. Supposed to save about 30 kms of the journey.

I wasn't privy to their initial plans, but fortunately got involved last thursday, courtesy Satish. Satish enquired in a mail about several aspects of long distance cycling. Hence I also got to know about their plans. Frankly, I hadn't cycled in very large groups and I was interested in doing it. I readily threw my weekend plans and became part of the pedalathon team. I was also keen to try out my Viper in a long distance trip. So I got a carriage fitted onto the Viper. Thanks to Lalu( my mechanic) , this ceased to be a hassle.

The "official" website for the trip is : pedalathon.pbwiki.com.

The full team : Ajay, Guru, Kiruba, KK, Sandeep, Satish, Shree and Shyam. Abhi was on a motorcycle, constituting the support team. He turned out to play an important role too...

9May/067

Around the world in 20 months!

Can't resist posting this amazing piece of news. Avijit Chakraborthy is on

A journey on a bicycle of about 64,000 km (40,000 miles) across 62 countries in 20 months...

He started off on March 2005 and hopes to finish by November 2006. As of May 2006, he had already completed 41,250 km across 36 countries. Learn more here.

In case you didn't get it, that's an amazing average of 107 kilometers a day over a 20 month period. He is married and has a kid too! If he succeeds, he will have a guinness record to boot! Way to go, Avijit - and all the best to you...

(Last Thought - 1) : Shree, what the heck are you doing in office ?
(Last Thought) : Records are made to be broken 😉

9May/0623

Motorbiking to Munnar

Decided sometime last week that it was time for a long ride - this time on a motorcycle. I reckoned that my Pulsar 180 had gathered dust for too long and that it was time to lose control!

Monday was a holiday on account of May day. The traveller in me imagined that three days would be too small for a motorbike ride. So I took a day off on tuesday. With four days under my belt (Apr 29,30 and May 1,2), a long journey beckoned.

My brother was also keen on a ride - and he was keen to ride solo too. So we decided that he will ride solo and I'd try and get a partner. That didn't work out. We both set out solo - a Pulsar and a Fiero. The men and their machines.

Initially, I had planned to visit Kemmannagundi on Day 1, reach a place near Munnar on Day 2, Munnar on Day 3 and return journey on Day 4. I had estimated the journey to be around 1500 kms. Good enough, for 4 days.

A look at Outlook's "52 Weekend Getaways" told me that the best route to Kemmannagundi was over Hassan and Chickmagalur. We planned to finish the day at an aunt's place near Manjeshwar (Kerala). This place is quite near to the Karnataka-Kerala border. So we started early on Saturday (29th April). At 5:15 AM our engines were already roaring.

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11Apr/067

Technomania@BDT

Raghava and me had gone to Davangere last saturday. The occasion was a two day state-level technical festival in our engineering college, B.D.T. College of Engineering.

The mode of transport was a motor-bike - Raghava's Pulsar 150 DTS-i. We had chosen it hoping to get good mileage, but that was not to be. The Pulsar returned about 32 kms/liter - blame the high speeds and the good roads for this.

The road from Bangalore to Davanagere (260 kms) is largely good. The best stretch on NH4 is from Tumkur to Sira. The segment from Chitradurga to Davangere is the worst. Not that it is rank bad, but at many places, the road is still under construction. We started at around 4:15 in the morning on saturday. We were in Davangere on 8:45, inclusive of some tea breaks. We were largely riding at speeds 90+ - 110 is the max the bike was capable of.

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13Feb/068

Delhi-Agra Trip

I was in Delhi recently. I was attending LinuxAsia, "Asia'a Premier Open Source Conference & Expo".

The conference was from 8th to 10th. HP (my employer) was the platinum sponsor and that meant that we had to show some demos at the commercial expo. Frankly, I prefer FOSS.IN anyday (Include the disclaimer here : the views expressed here are my own and ...). Enough said 😉

Anyway, thanks to LinuxAsia, I got to visit Delhi. The conference was held in the India Habitat Center, on Lodhi Road. The school where I finished my primary education, Delhi Kannada School, is also on the same road. I have many fond memories of Delhi and they came flooding back as I travelled on the various roads. Unfortunately, I couldn't revisit much of Delhi. I spent almost a day and a half on a visit to Agra, with a colleague. Few pics below:

Now, I am back at Bangalore. Good times have to have an end, don't you think ?

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