Kemmangundi --> Serve Chilled PART I

The last weekend of last month I visited Kemmangundi. This was a bike trip, and I am always a sucker for bike trips. I jumped at the idea when Uday invited me for this. I was writing a log of the whole thing and realised that it would be a very long recount. So I have decided to break it up into three parts recollecting the three days we biked. Here is the first of the series.


The riders:Uday (Ambition)
Reddy (Electra)
Murgesh (Pulsar)
Sumanth (Thunderbird)
The pillion: Jaggi

This was an amazing ride whose memories will linger for a long long time. Good roads, good company and a damn good bike. What more do you need? The planning was all done by Uday. We had a long weekend coming up and so I too jumped at the offer. initially I was a little aprehensive as Uday was the only one I knew in the group. This apprehension vanished in just a little while as I got to know the others and they were all just great. There was a lot of camaradrie and I was happy to gel in so quickly.
The ride was planned over 3 days. We would visit Kemmangundi and then move on to davangere to Attend uday's classmate's wedding and then return home.

DAY 1: 30-Oct-04

We were to start off at 6:00 am from tumkur road, near the Outer ring road. I was working in the night shift and was planning to go home, pick my bag and start off. I knew I was not going to get any sleep for at least another 14 hours. This was fine as I knew the ride would make it worh it. The initial plan was for the others to start off, and I would catch up with them on the way, as I would not be able to make it only by 6:30 am. Lucky for me Reddy ran a little late and I left the office earlier than expected and was at the meeting point by 6:10. The early morning empty roads also played their part. By now it had started drizzling and we thought we would come across some heavy rain soon. luckily that too did not happen. We were actually very lucky throughout our journey. We had got hardly any planning other than the destinations and everything just fell into place as we moved ahead.

The road from Tumkur to Kunigal was just awesome and we al let loose. I had fun testing out the top end of my bike. Initially I was planning on doing a steady 80 or so. After watching everybody let loose I too starting speeding and reached 120 kmph at one point. I had fun dragging with a SUMO. I would overtake this guy evry once in a while and then let him pass just to bruise his ego another time.Going al out we reached Kunigal in no time and stopped for breakfast here.

Breakfast was a 30 minute affair, and after that the good roads continued. I was hoping that we get some narrow roads for some time at least, as I was getting tired of riping at high speeds all the time. Our next stop was just before Hassan. From Hassan we were to go to Belur. We were asking people for directions and one of the cops gave us the wrong directions. We went on for anout 2 kms before reklising we were headed in the wrong direction. We got back on the right road soon, not before passing through a lot of HAssan traffic. From here the roads got a little bad. For quite a distance there was only half a road as it was still under construction. It was fun to ride on this however as th eroad was more like a maze, and we had to keep swnging from left to right, to avoid all the potholes.

At Belur we had a small break at a Bakery. Here the owner confused us with his broken english. We asked him how much furthur to Chikmagalur and he said 74 kms, and we later found out that this was actually only 24 km's. Chikmaglur was conquered at 12:30 pm. Here we settled down for lunch and boy was it good. Chikmaglur is something straight out of some R.K Narayanan's book. It has the mix of the old and the new and both co-exist peacefully, at-least that's how it looked to me.

After lunch, we set off towards Kemmangundi. from now on we would be travelling on Narrow winding roads and would have to keep to our formation. Murgesh was in the lead, and Uday was the tail. The two bullets would keep swapping our places intermittently. Upto now, we had seen lush green fields on the highway. Now we got to see the Red soil for which this place was famous for. As it had been raining, the road was pretty slippery and muddy. The highlight of this part of the ride, was that we saw a HUGE battalion of cops swarming all over the highway, going towards Chikmaglur. Reddy almost met one of their trucks head-on but missed getting packed off into the mountain by just a few inches. After this it was relatively smooth sailing except for the road being slippery thanks to the rains that had lashed this place.

We stoppped at almost every bend and viewpoint to experience the sheer beauty of the place. The place was just so beautiful and Serene that I canot put it into words. The pictures we have taken do a lot of justice to the place but the real experience is something else.Our next stop was at Dattatreya Peeta. this is a shrine where the hindu and muslim Gods co-exist. This place is an eye-opener. Sadly it is not maintained as it deserves to be. After this shrine, there is a road that goes up to the top of this mountain, where a supposedly sacred sanctifying water-fall existed. By now the place was enveloped in a thick fog and visibility was down to around 10 feet or so. Now thanks to my sharp headlight I was the lead. The next 3 kms took us almost 10 minutes. This part of the ride was absolute thrill and was heightened by the fact that if we went off the road, that ould be the nend of us. The road came to a sudden halt and I had to brake suddenly to stop from driving off the cliff. We then explored the water-fall here. The story goes that you come here and have a bath in this falls to wash away your sins. You will have to leave behind every piece of clothing you came with. This was the sad part and people used this as an excuse to defile the place. The place was absolutely filled with clothes left behind by all those "sinners". According to me their sins would have doubled by resorting to discarding their clothes in this manner and spoling this place.

We left this place and started off on our journey towards Kemmangundi. This was going to be the last stretch. Here we passed a stretch of road which I have enjoyed the most. The road was a very narrow and winding one. Also, it had grass which was about waist height enveloping the edges of the road. We all went full blast on this stretch. At any given time, the gap between any 2 vehicles was just 5 feet. This required complete trust in the rider ahead, because if one rider had braked suddenly, we were all goners. Sadly we do not have any pictures of this stretch as we were all so thrilled at the ride that it slipped our mind completely.

Reached Kemmangundi finally by around 5:30, but found the whole place engulfed by fog, and so we missed the sunset. Darkness set in pretty quicly and we launched our hunt for a place to stay. We wer lucky that we got a decent enough place to stay at even though the place was pretty crowded. Since it was a long weekend, there were a lot of people here. Dinner was by 9:30 and we spent time just making arrangements for our food and stay until then. Hit the sack by around 10 or so. It was then that I realised that I had not slept a wink in the past 28 hours.


Next update as time permits me....