“I know my tyres”, the words of a man who would pay for the statement with Rs.175…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Since it was the weekend, 4 of us from the office decided to get out of Bangalore and check out the ‘wild outdoors’…and no I’m not talking about MG Road and its reduced space as a result of the Metro Invasion.
Ok…lets get done with the basics first…Julian and Kiran from my office have been wanting to go out on a trip out of town for a while…I am always up for some travel considering I have nothing better to do…and Soma…well, is looking at making a world record by being able to sleep in any and every form of transport known to man. He has been quite successful so far. He has slept in a plane, a train, Bus (While standing), a car and my gypsy even when roads were bad, and now even between speed breakers…will tell you about that in a while…now just the basics…1 Married man, 1 soon to be married man and 2 chaps with so signs of girl friends and one diesel car…those were the characters on the trip.
Yes…for a change we decided not to take Bhima out of town and take a car instead of a jeep just to feel the difference.
Till Friday evening we were unable to decide on where we were going to head out …but then Kiran told us that his brother had been to Kudremukh recently and it was just like Switzerland. We were naturally excited…a place 300 km west of Bangalore, with snow…wonderful…but within a split second (that’s a really really short period of time…almost as long as it took people to realize that Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag was the World’s worst film) logic kicked us in the arse and we in turn reminded Kiran that, snow in West Karnataka was a unlikely as Tussar Kapoor winning an Oscar for Best Actor.
Anyways…just for the heck of it, we decided to head out to Kudremukh. For those of you who are not familiar with the place, ‘Kudremukh’ mean ‘Horse Face’…a mountain that looks like the face of a horse.
Our plan was simple, 300km, 6 hours and so we could leave late at night and get to Kudremukh by 6 in the morning. At 12 in the night the 4 of us packed into the car and headed west. Luck would have it that the clouds that were thus far holding out, could hold on no longer and just had to go…this meant that the roads were wet, slippery and largely invisible. We were however able to maintain consistent high speeds of 20 to 25 kmph. This meant that if you were on cycles you would reach faster than us. There is just something poetic about leaving the traffic congested roads of a city where you get to drive pretty much all the time on first gear and let loose on the highways pretty much peaking your gears at second…poetic…its what every city dweller dreams of.
So, to make a short story longer, at 6 am, we were 200 km away from Bangalore in a small town called Belur…this was just about half the distance we really needed to cover. Now since there is no real point having a plan and not changing it all the time, we decided that we should change the plan just a little bit because to be really honest we did not have a choice and hence decided to spend sometime checking out the 800 year old temple. Just before we did that however we had to fill our stomachs like polar bears worried about the long winter ahead. Over breakfast we came up with an interesting way to make the meal ‘interesting’…basically we all needed to guess how much the entire meal would cost and the person who is closest to the actual bill amount, pays the bill…basically stupidly would be rewarded…and I must say that I felt stupid after breakfast…but did not need to pay the bill.
Belur and its temple, quite to our surprise is a very beautiful and awesome place to visit. I would recommend it not just as a stop over on a longer journey but also as a place to visit on its own…also while you are there, play the “Food Bill Guessing Game”…here are the Rules.
1. Everyone Orders without seeing the menu.
2. Eat as much as you want.
3. Once you are done, everyone guesses what the bill amount will come up to.
4. The person who is the “smartest” and comes closest to the bill amount WINS.
5. The person who is the “Smartest” gets Bragging rights…and a lighter wallet.
6. Those who “LOSE” act really sad.
Those are the approved rules of the game…BTW…Soma won the game when we played it.
Ok, now with our sad faces because of our deep loss, we headed again towards Kudremukh. Along the way, we asked people the route and they guided us “wonderfully.” This is what the road looked like.
As you can guess we were able to again reach incredible speeds of up to 22kmph. This meant that we got to Kudremukh at 5:30 in the evening…bringing our total travel time to 17 and a half hours…we had traveled wet roads, no roads, mud roads and finally ghat roads to make it to the place that was described to us as “Switzerland.” I must say; I was a little disappointed to see ‘no snow’…damn…all that time in the car and no snow…I would be hurt had I not saved some money earlier that morning by “losing” the “Food Bill Guessing Game”…
Ok…lets put emotion aside for 43 seconds…tra la la la la…
We entered the hotel, which was quite amazing but ‘quite’ expensive I must add. The double room with a TV cost Rs. 450 and the Double room without the TV but with an extra bed and a loft with a study, cost Rs.250 for a night. I mean…after prices like that, we did not have the heart to ask if they accepted credit cards…The only positive of a long journey became apparent just then…we realized that instead of 2 nights…our long journey resulted in us only having to pay for 1 night…ooh…the saving…
Anyways, we entered our rooms at 6pm, just about 12 hours later than we were supposed to arrive and then watched the Twenty20 Match between India and Australia and then hit the sack…The next morning we got up by 8 and decided to take in the beauty of Kudremukh and check out the horse face mountain for ourselves.
So we left the hotel and asked the gentleman at the reception how we could drive down to the horse face mountain…ie. Kudremukh. The kind gentleman told us that we needed to drive down the hill for about 10 km and then trek 14km though the forest to see the wonder of nature that was “Kudremukh’. That was when we decided that there was no REAL need to give a definite image to what our imagination had dreamed up. And so we left the hill station with our only picture of the horse being the one you see below.
This meant that our journey to Bangalore started quite early in the day…after all we had to drive through roads and no roads to back home. We headed east with a lot of the small little problems and a lot of big quotations. The small problems included driving 1 km down the hill with the boot of the car open…and Soma constantly sleeping after a big meal. The quotations however were a little more interesting…Kiran - whenever we told him that we felt his Tyre air pressure was low, would say, “I know my Tyre.”
About two hours later, his rear tyre got punctured and we had to change the tyre midway and then headed to a puncture shop. This is where I would like to remind you that Kiran said, “I know my Tyre.’…well when the guy at the puncture repair show opened the tyre to fix the puncture, he immediately pointed out that the tube in the tyre was that of a Maruti 800 and not that of a Tata Indicar which it should have been…In Kiran’s defense however you could say that he did say that he knew his tyre…his TUBE was a whole different story.
After spending 175 bucks to repair the puncher and change the tube we finally got back to Bangalore at 12 midnight, helping us beat our previous journey time record of 17 and half hours by a whole 2 hours…WOW…what timing yaar…Clap Clap Clap….come on that is impressive 300 km in 15.5 hours…oh sorry did I mention we took the wrong diversion and actually traveled 412 km instead of the 297km which is the actual distance between Bangalore and Kudremukh…I didn’t…cool…so lets just act as though I never said that…
Labels: Bangalore Airport, Karnataka, Kudremukh, NH 48, Rohit Jayakaran
