Ride To Yogavana Hills

Friday Afternoon:

I am slogging at my desk to complete the pending work before the day ends. Suddenly a thud takes my concentration away. I clear the blinds and find it is the gush of wind hitting my window pane.

Mother Nature has set everything in topsy-turvy….the open-air smoking bay down the stairs is a complete mess with ash and butts floating on the water. The hail storm settles after an hour.

Vishy’s SMS comes. “Man tomorrow’s ride will be really cool or rather chilled J just look at the rain and wind blowing”. Amidst all the serious stuff of office I have forgot that I have a ride tomorrow. Yogavana Hills trail ride. 

Saturday Morning 4:40

My mobile vibrates with alarms and I jump out of the bed to switch the light on. Pedal-Ripping starts. Leaving the cozy warmth of bed, the biker starts the day at 5:10 am. As promised, I wait for Karthik at Diamond District and then move on after finding no response to my SMS and phone-call. Poor guy must be sleeping!

At 6 o’ clock I am at Merida Junction (erstwhile Family Mart Junction), J P Nagar, 100 Feet Road. People pass on their “HI” s with a cup of tea from the chai-stall. Early morning tea with biscuits……takes me to the days of higher secondary exams when my mom used to wake me up with a sentence, “the tea is ready.”

We start our ride. Early morning breeze with a overcast sky set a perfect beginning to start our biking. Me, Vishy, Nitin, Vinay, Praveen, Murthy, Pradeep and Prashant. After a while Prashant leaves us for NICE Corridor riding. This guy wants to practice some stunts.  We go ahead.

All I can hear is heavy wind passing by my ears and the sound of gear- shifting. Kanakpura road has good scenery on either side of it. One gets good learning of gear ratios when he is practicing them. (Front Derailleur) 1: (Rear Derailleur) 2-3-4, 2: 4-5-6-7, 3: 6-7-8. Sometime back, I learnt this from one of the websites.

After half an hour, we take a break. None of us are looking tired. 5 minutes of chit-chats and laughter. Bikers move one. Nitin introduces himself. This lad is from Rohini, New Delhi. We start discussing the usual stuff like how things are different here from Delhi.

We reach the point from where we need to take a right. It is a typical off-road biking track. The trail is rocky, kaccha, bumpy….whatever you wanna call. Roadbikers have to be extra-careful. But we all are on MTBs.

The fork suspension helps me a lot. By the time this stretch ends, we find the bakras making their way. One dog starts chasing Murthi. The brakes are so perfect that the bike stops then and there and he falls from the bike. Murthi loses his balance. Let's check the bruises. It could have become fatal! Thanks to the gloves and helmet, our man is perfectly OK.

 

Time to pedal up the hill, making our way through the big stones and bushes! The road is not maintained at all. After certain limit the bikers start walking, because there is no road. A lonely temple up there is welcoming us. We park our bike at the base of the staircase and then climb up to the temple. One can get an amazing view from here. It’s 7:30 am. The clouds are still hugging the remote mountains that are visible from the top of Yogavana.

Pradeep starts clicking. I forgot to take the cam, so take out my mobile phone and freeze some of the moments. Another round of biscuits and water; another round of talks and sharing. Murthi cracks some episodes of “Khosla ka Ghosla” and we all start laughing at the character of Kishan Khurana (acted by Boman Irani). No doubt this actor is a gem!

8 am

Time to be back on the saddles!

Pradeep loads the photographs on to his flickr from his mobile.

Riding a rocky downhill is difficult yet enjoyable. Total control needs to be put on the bike and your body. Fitness and sense of maintaining the center of gravity help a lot in this. This time we find uphill roads and my energy level drops a bit. I put the ratio at 2: 4-5. It gives me realaxation of muscles.

After an hour of ride we find a hotel. Very neat and clean! So we gorge on our breakfast! Idli, Vada, Tea and Orange Juice. The food is cheap yet hygienic. We check out the time, it’s 9. Another 18 kilometers. The Sun is not yet coming out of the veils of cloud. We move on!

Here comes NICE corridor and we take a break again! This time we wait for Pravin who is real slow as he is not able to maneuver the gears of his newly bought Trek. After a brief gyan session to Pravin on gear ratio, we head towards Merida Junction.

10:15 am

we are standing in front of the Merida Showroom, waiting for Navin to come back and open the shop so that we can check out some biking shorts and all other stuffs. We call up Navin. Navin is doing some dirt jumping at Sarjapur on his UMF Hardy and will be back after half an hour. We call him up once again. This time he says that he has a got a flat-tire. He will be late. Enough of wait! Time to get home!!! I am feeling hungry! 

For more photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/amartya.k/YogavanaHills#

My New Bike

It has always been a matter of amazement to see those techno-bikes whooshing past.....the ones on TV screen! On my daily walk to the bus stand I found them passing by ME...in reality! I spotted couple of young fellas with backpacks, pedaling; felt a bit envious about their physique...slender and glowing! Soon I realised it is the magic of excercise....the machine between the two legs (:p..dirty mind! Don’t dive in) has done this magic........

Since sedentary job, junks etc. etc. gave a growth in the girth I thought of buying a bi-cycle....with the resolve to make myself fit and save bucks on auto expenses. So I bought a Hercules MTB. It came as a basic bike with no fork suspension or multiple gears. It was a great fun, I must say! After a long long time I found cycling to be fun...earlier it was a need. The short rides to Indiranagar and Thippasandra never made me tired. One fine morning I took this bike to Manchanabele Dam...not joking! It was a painstaking achievement for me to pedal all the way to Manchanabele Dam. Actually, this trip made me resolute about thinking of a multi-gear bike. Long rides and Single geared bike? IMPOSSIBLE!

I was a bit skeptical about shelling out a bomb during this time of recession and hence kept on negotiating with myself. After a long wait the Hercules MTB was sold and then my Merida Matts 20MD arrived.

Before buying this smooth machine I did a lot of research on Firefox, Merida and Trek. Read a lot of blogs...went through lot of threads on the web. Firefox Target was my first choice because of budget constraint...then I stretched it a bit and I was at the level of Firefox Viper. My friend Vishy said, at the same budget Trek 3700 is available and it is an imported one. The website of Trek is amazing as it gives you the details with product videos. Merida was another brand that attracted me in terms of money and features. Trek was not offering me 8x3 gear combination, with Mechanical Disc Brakes at my kinda budget.

Firefox was out of question after what I came to know about the product.
a) There is no proper after-sales-support at the Firefox showrooms. Sorry to say most of the mechanics don't know about the technology of gears and all.
b) They claim Firefox to be a bike from the UK. But it is not. It is designed in the UK and manufactured in India.
c) The spare parts are not so good.
d) The gears start giving problems after a while.

So I made up my mind on a Sunday and jumped on to the court.......took an auto to J P Nagar and met Venky at his shop. The Merida shop at 100ft road has a good collection of bikes. Venky, being a national champion, has got good knowledge of biking and so is Navin, although he is a very young fellow(Just figured out, he is in B.COM. 1st Year).

Before settling down on my 20MD, I checked out all other models....20V, 40V, 40MD.....
One good thing about Venky is - he is not a mere businessman.
He gave me a lot of suggestions on the positives of each model and how is that going to make difference in the experience.

Time to pay Venky! Navin had already started to fix up the backlight, tighten the screws and nuts. There were three ATMs nearby - ICICI, Canara and Bank of India. ICICI was not working for the cards of other banks. There were some issues. BOI ATM was closed due to some technical failure and Canara Bank was showing some error message. So we loaded the bike on Venky's Scorpio and went to his residence. The swiping machine made life easier. By the way, I got the bottle cage, sipper and lock for free.

The first ride to Airport Road from Chamrajpet was extraordinary. Me sitting on a Merida..I could not believe it! It's like dreams coming true! Flyovers and hilly terrains of Bangalore has not been a problem ever since!

Biking

Since my childhood I was a fan of bi-cycles. The first one I got was when I reached Level 2. It was a different feeling altogether! It took one month for me to find the balance. Since my upbringing was in a village, cycle has always been a mode of transport for me. But I never realized the importance of cycling, until I started gaining weight.

Before coming down to Bangalore I had no idea of how passionate can one be about this particular vehicle, which runs on pure adrenalin. To be honest, I got the new term for a cycle, "Bike." I also met people who are very serious in sending the Go-Green statement to each and every people around them.

Finance people would term Cycle as a low-opex machinery. One time investment and very negligible amount of maintenance. What else do you require?

India, being a hot and humid country, may not attract people to taking to biking for all basic purposes like going to the office.
But weekend rides can be a good way of keeping yourself fit and it is always full of enjoyment, especially when you have lot of bikers, riding in flocks.


Bangalore has always taken the pride of being a beautiful city with nice weather added by the educated youth population swarming in due to the advancement of IT/ITES/TELECOM and others. Now the scenario is changing. With the sudden outburst of people, this city is experiencing the onslaught of every possible bad situation including pollution; air-pollution being the alarming one. To cut the amount of pollution, we need some alternative arrangement like cycle that does not pollute the environment even by a single iota of smoke.

To spread the awareness of cycling Criticalmass (http://criticalmassbangalore.blogspot.com/), holds a biking event on every last Saturday of a month. The rally starts from Cubbon Park at around 3:30-4:30pm and then rolls on to any corner of Bangalore. The best part of this rally is BIKE-SALUTING. I have been a part of this rally and found it quite energizing! You be part of it! Save Bangalore!