Living Roads(Interactions with the hills and seas, some musings and a travel story)

“There is a meaning in each curve and line”
The bike sounds good, its temperature feels fine, the throttle responds with pleasure. I stop and take stock of the situation. By my estimate, I am about 10 mins, and an equal number of kilometers behind the rest of the speeders. Fully aware that they won’t budge from the fork ahead until I show up; feel guilty in stealing this minute to stop the bike on the roadside. I breathe an eyeful of this view. Have just turned around a bend on a thinly spread hill road. The bike is kind of perched on the side of a giant ridge, and open before me is a vista, which promises never to return.
A green valley with crepe hills on the faraway bank, like a divine muslin, clouds separating the two of us, trees erect and defying the wind’s commandments in all colors of green and white. A grove with green branches and white cap is the only distinction to remind one that it is no matter of mere chance that they stand here.
30th April, annus mirabilis 2005, just after Sakleshpur, deviation towards Horanadu, There is something magical about this place.

7 hours ago I had woken up to an otherwise utterly lazy looking Saturday morning and packed a lot of useless stuff into my bag, loaded and taken off. The actors of this play had been a mix of mutually known and unknown, namely Ashvin, Vicky, Arun, Sanjay, Amith, Srinidhi and yours truly.
On the road, the wind had been flat and the sun mellow, a perfect occasion to let your creativity run riot. Actors had met, smiled and sailed stopping occasionally only for tea. Hassan was to be the first target destination.

The mango and mocha highways
Nelamangala! What do mango trees do to look so wild and beautiful? One particular tree – branchless up to its torso, 4 meters or so from the ground and suddenly a blooming mushroom of shiny green leaves and rough unripe mangoes only visible to a discerning eye.
The road has its crests and troughs. The crests offer a window into another world weaved in a golden thread, long stretches of plains smoking the morning mist and families of birds taking off to learn flying. The irony is that we came here to watch this play, but right now we folks are in a hurry. Not a new one by any measure!
Srinidhi who has been keeping a lookout for me in the distance becomes exasperated with my snail pace and takes off into infinity to do some riding.

The mango highway quickly disappears and Hassan is ahead of us. The one thing we spend time on generously is eating. Kamat-Upachar is the fuel station for the hungry and Arun is missed on the first meal of the tour, he skipped the lookout for the restaurant, and rejoins us at the Hassan bypass to Sakleshpur.
Sakleshpur too appears before long and its first sign is a coffee plantation enveloping the road. I shrug it off initially thinking it’s too early in the day for this sight. I am proved wrong in a matter of few kilometers. Continuous stretches of coffee plantations on both sides confirm that the pilgrimage indeed has begun. In Sakleshpur, Vicky takes us to his grandparent’s house, where hospitality is thoroughly enjoyed, and dudes are shortly refreshed.

After Sakleshpur a right deviation is taken. Red soil, green trees, blue jaded skies are all over the place in a mélange of colors with no definite line as to which color ends where. Probably a casual sight to an onlooker, but to the eccentrics, this is a cure.

Soon a deviation appears that will take us towards Horanadu and Agumbe. This is probably the beginning of a wild life sanctuary, and I hope to catch a glimpse of a bison or even a Langoor, but this hope will be carried into another trip.

The punishment for stealing moments on the road is that I am put in the lead of the pack.
What follows next is what every biker can feel but never explain. Whose hand has swathed these hills? Why do they HAVE to be beautiful? They might as well have been ugly had the God’s toss gone wrong.

Green, green, dark green, green, mellow green, green, red, green, green, yellow. There is no pattern in the color of these trees; they are, like their audience, completely random and unpredictable.
One has to kiss the roads to negotiate a turn here, no place for cruisers this. Which land does this road lead us to? A small bridge on a brook: a sudden change in the temperature and the sound, a gurgle mixed with the bike’s sound, then an uphill climb. Finally people appear and this motorized demon of a snake enters the Horanadu temple premises. Time: 1530 hrs.

Food here is free for the pilgrims and who is in need of it more than us? After the food a small nap ‘mangta hai’, will substitute it for a cup of tea some kilometers ahead.
Amith and Srinidhi decide to turn back from here. They wish to write a different log. Photos are done for the leaving duo. Best of luck!

A horse that does not run
Destinations change often, one of the reasons everybody loves to travel. We set sights on Kudremukh: the horse’s face. Through the Kudremukh national park we go. The jungle on both sides is so thick that nothing is visible beyond the first line of trees. A fine trail, I muse, for a trekker who wants to go nowhere in particular.
The horse’s face appears suddenly after a bend, and is it a giant horse!
After riding a few more kilometers the pilgrims find their deity; a spectacular view of Kudremukh hills over the Lakkiya dam.
It is wide like an ocean of hills bursting into the sky. It’s impossible to catch all of it in an eyeful. The hilltops are naked themselves, but the trees fill the crevices in abundance. I imagine if the trees were showered later on the hills and they all got deposited in the folds?
If these hills were white they could be mistaken for Himalayas. The dam itself is full of quicksand and iron ore and the opposite bank is whispering in the horizon only to be saved by the mighty hill range

1730, Vicky and Sanjay decide to set the pace and make it to Agumbe, 55 Kms ahead, in time for viewing the sunset. I let go of my throttle and the run-in precautions, the bike swallows anything that the hills throws@ 85 Kmph, but after 20 mins the sun is already setting. Change of plans: caution mode is back as the darkness sets in.

Night on a semi finished flyover?
1900 hrs, Sringeri arrives, or rather we arrive in Sringeri. The town has a genuine character to it and it can be felt as we go though its streets. The mutt is a serene place a mix of ancient and new buildings. The ancient ones are grand and magnificent and subdue the conscious, while the new ones are fake replicas, attempting to recapture the old glory at a low cost. We leave after darshan and some photos.

Whoever thinks we travel to see places is only half correct. What about the sounds, the smells, the changes in temperature near the motes? These take over at night.
I nearly fantasize open eyed the sounds of the whining shoots, and mating crickets and lizards, and the pictures of Nelamangala mangoes appear in the mind’s eye. The Agumbe sunset point is reached, albeit at night. At the end of horizon, a glow of light is visible. Vicky points out that the place is Mangalore, 150 Kms from this point. It is 2120 already. After a few ‘neeru’ dosais everyone is refueled to push ahead. Through Hebbri we go, and take a diversion towards Mangalore, through some smooth and some wicked roads, and some check posts which inform us that some highwaymen have struck come distance ahead.

1st May 2005, 0130 hrs. We bypass Mangalore and enter Kasargod. Communist insignia and IUML slogans confirm that this is indeed Kerala. It’s a big pain to find a hotel room at 0200 hrs and some bystander suggests a nice seaside resort at the Bekal fort 15 Kms away.
What is found there instead is an office of the tourism deptt. 15 more Kms ahead is Kanhangarh, which, it is promised by the watchman, has plenty of hotels. We go to one and the owner refuses to open the door. Black night, no place, and no energy in your body: a way of getting high and start spewing weird ideas. Praveen suggests that we sleep on a half constructed flyover nearby. Ashvin suggests we sleep right there on the footpath, I blink at this latter idea and think that the morning chores would be easier to do over the ledge of the flyover.
At 0300 hrs the life isn’t getting any adventurous. All I ask for is a place to crash. Vicky and Arun’s cool headedness comes to rescue as they discover and negotiate a hotel room somewhat magically.

Everyone is in the need of a new pair of butts. Hopefully we’ll have them delivered in time for tomorrows ride back home. Godspeed!

Of seas and black stones, and their lovers
Begin the day at 1100 hrs, not a thing that mom would approve of. Breaker à Dosai + Coffee. Bekal fort is a low-lying fort, which faces the sea in a short cliff and is chiefly composed of gun-stations. Flat approaches to these make one wonder, what howitzers must have roared here and to protect what. Probably a west coast military strategy borrowed from the Portuguese / Goans

The sea is a direct antonym of the hill, and yet they are both the manifestations of the same force somewhere at the base. The vast nothingness for as far as the sight goes, and assuredly even beyond that, and the defiant capes piercing this deadly authority…what does all this mean? Is it not an obligation to live life deliberately?
Kappil beach is not very different but it is extremely pristine. Park the bikes as far as they would go and then enjoy the water. There is more to this beach than meets the eye.
Creatures live beneath the first layer of sand and the waves leave holes in the sand where the creatures breathe.
1540 hrs: time to head home. Somebody has appropriately named this the MotoGP track, a perfectly smooth road from Kasargod to Talacauvery. Déjà vu: race against the sunset, which is to be viewed at Talacauvery. The Sun wins hands down. We regroup at a roadside hanging bridge over a brook. The sun is almost set and sends golden reflections into the rippling rivulet; the water is smoking and some cranes play around while returning home, in this green bowl, the home of Nordic Valkyries.

Sanjay’s bright headlight becomes the harbinger of this hippie group, which would go anywhere this road would go, in this case Madikeri.
After some more of churning twisties, 2045 announces Madikeri. Fuel for the machines. Fuel for the riders takes more time though and we exit the place only at 2230 hrs. After the twisted ghats are done under the psychedelic delusions of bed and tea gardens, the guns start blazing. I feel sleepy. The group system, a legacy from the Wayanad trip is to be followed now. Praveen, the person following me, is overcome by the clean road offered and overtakes a sleepy rider named ‘me’.

I suspect a following lorry driver of trying to murder me and I take off like anything. In an hour or so of this murderous hide and seek, I give up when the lorry drier amazingly passes peacefully. Regrouping. Every star, which is close enough to send its light to the earth, is visible in its majestic radiance. I recognize a few constellations: the dragon, the serpent. Wonder if this could be a spot for an all night star gazing party.

2nd April 0230 hrs, Srirangapatanam is where one should be cautious, when home luck turns around. Last time it was Aadi who had had a fall, this time it’s Vicky with a nail in his rear wheel. It’s almost 0400 hrs when the tyre is mended and the gunslingers are ready to burn the roads. I follow them some distance behind and finally the sunrise is caught on the Mysore highway near Ramanagaram.




Ruminations
I must confess that it was a BIG mistake to go where we went and lived those moments, which we did, on our bikes. It’s a place where you go in your dreams, or on foot. Probably in a couple of years, it will be a huge confusion to see these places in dreams and pictures and then wonder if we went there at all.

I stand accused of quoting Proust here:
“The voyage of discovery is not about seeking new landscapes, it's about having new eyes”, and new eyes is what I need.

It’s a very unsettling process of going somewhere, having a thousand questions raked up, philosophizing and contemplating on simple things and then trying to figure out the big picture. Hopefully these thousand questions will help in coming out of the mollusk shell and then knowing what drove me. Till then it always seems as if the moon was coming closer. For a yet unknown reason, I love this process, and that is why I ride motorcycles.