Landed up early at the start point, thanks to an early morning wakeup call. But sitting there in front of the Town Hall waiting for all to land up on that cold morning I was half wishing I were in a warm and cozy bed. This time around on a ride we had a complete range of bikes, from 150cc to 1,150cc; boxer, inline 4s, inline twins, large and small displacement thumpers.

Slowly one by one all landed up (The names of people who made it to the ride can be seen in the pictures below along with their rides.) and a few had gone ahead in a car so that they didn’t find it too difficult keeping up with the bikes. This was the first time I got to see the latest Honda sport bike, the CBR1000RR in the flesh. It looks really compact and wicked; a perfect track tool.

We left Town Hall and hit Mysore road pretty quickly but due to the Golden Quadrilateral construction happening on the Bangalore – Mysore stretch, most of the bikes kept pretty much together. But there were stretches where the big bikes would just take off leaving the rest for dead. But the bad stretches helped the rest catch up, but it was very tough to keep up. We caught up with the guys in the car pretty soon and when we stopped for breakfast at a highway motel, Sandy who had left home late caught up with us.

It was by this time I was beginning to feel the strain of riding the bike without the engine mounting stay and bolt. I was being rattled really bad and finally decided to get it fixed before going ahead. When the fuel gulping bikes stopped for fuel a short distance before Mysore, I decided to peel off and get it fixed somehow in Mysore. Sandy decided to come with me and the two of us entered Mysore to look for a place that would fix bullets. After a bit of scouting we finally found one place that would do that but interestingly the thunderbird is a very rare bike there. I could not get the right size and had to fabricate it out of a long piece of metal. After a bit of cutting and drilling on it, it was ready to be on the bike.

We rode on and caught up with the guys who were drinking some coconut water under a tree just before Gundulpet. Once we regrouped we decided to stop for some lunch at Pugmarks, just outside Bandipur. After a few beers and some great lunch we decided to enter the forest roads of Bandipur. About 5 minutes into the ride it started pouring heavily and we all had to stop in the middle of the forest to get the wet weather gear on, despite rules that forbid people from stopping when passing through that particular stretch of forest due to animal crossings. As we padded up we took off. At a certain corner, I had my b*lls in my mouth, the rear just lost traction and I was suddenly fighting to keep the bike on the road and was just counting myself lucky to have kept the rubber side down on the road when I saw Vodka bouncing on his RD coming out of the forest back onto the road about 50mts ahead. Very slippery turn not too sure why. At the Karnataka – Tamil Nadu border we caught up with Arun who’d decided not to stop in between. After paying the toll, it started pouring even heavier and we took off towards Wild Haven, because we thought the rest must be taking shelter somewhere waiting for the rain to abate.

All the vibration due to the engine stay bolt had made the electrical components under the tank to slide down a bit and take a peek out at the rain. That was enough to make the bike splutter. I tried riding on, but finally in one of the slower sections, it finally died. I honked to Arun to indicate that I was stopping and pulled over. Arun too stopped and after a bit of wiping and stuffing the parts back up under the tank, I got the bike to start, but the catch being if I let the revs drop, the engine used to shut off. We started off with Arun following me a short distance behind. After a short distance into a turn, I see a HUGE wild bison bang in the middle of road. The length of this amazing animal spanning the whole breadth of the relatively narrow road. I had to stop, because of nowhere to go and kept revving the bike so that it doesn’t die. This is one time I hated the loud Goldstar replica silencer. The bison visibly irritated by this went off the road but immediately turned to look at me trying very hard to get the bike into motion, which wasn’t happening. If the bike hadn’t moved for another second I would have dumped it right there and jumped behind Arun and fled the scene. I got into motion and Arun who was behind saw the bison digging the earth with his horn. The rest of the way to Wild Haven was pretty normal and when we reached there, we saw Vodka and Mani waiting for us at the turn off. We waited for a while more for the rest and decided to go to the place and get things ready for the rest when they came.

Once we got in and changed into dry clothes came the call from Anand, which said that Adrian had crashed the RD in the rain and was being taken to a hospital with a suspected collarbone fracture. He’d gone of the road after losing traction, hit a ditch, got thrown off the bike, and landed on his shoulder with the bike somersaulting and sliding. Proper gear had saved him, but the bike was a mess cosmetically. It was barely ride worthy and being ridden by someone else. Shortly after this, the second batch of riders landed up at the turnoff and we sent them to settle in and left to check on Adrian at the hospital some 30kms away in Gudalur. I sat behind Vodka and Sandy behind Arun. This was one of the worst decisions I ever made. Nothing against Vodka, but at the end of this ordeal I was pretty much shaken up. Firstly I’m not comfortable being a pillion and secondly not on an RD. We reached the hospital, seeing a few wild elephants on the way. Adrian’s condition was ok and cheerful and it was ‘only’ a dislocation. We came back to the resort and the party began in full swing.

Lots of things happened during the night, most of which I cannot write out here. But I cannot but write about things like Killer trying to hump a pussy (a fat cat I say!) a wild lone tusker trumpeting and coming into the resort and causing havoc for a while (including causing Lepp to run back from the darkness where he was taking a leak; one hand in a sling, the other zipping up), usual RD-Bullet comments, a huge bonfire, which people kept running to the wee hours of the morning and so on.

The next morning everyone but Arun and myself returned home through the route we had come the previous day. The two of us decided to ride through the Ooty-Coonoor-Sathyamangalam-Dimbham-Kollegal route. As we were about to leave, we were told that the Kothagiri route was more scenic and we decided to skip Coonoor and ride through Kothagiri after Ooty. This must be among of the best stretches of flowing tarmac that I have seen up in the hills. And the scenes that you see as you come out of a few of the turns is absolutely mind blowing. We had a lazy ride back stopping often when and where we felt like and during one such stop got blasted by the Tamil Nadu highway police. Halfway up the Dimbham, the weather was perfect and the scenery too, so we had decided to stop. The tarmac felt so good that I decided to lie down at one side of the road and Arun was sitting close by. Vehicles came and went and there was no problem since it was an uphill and vehicles passed by slowly. There were hardly any vehicles but I kept an eye on them anyway. About 15 minutes later a jeep approached and came to stop where we were and out jumped a police officer and started yelling at us. Things like “What are you doing? Full drunken mode-ah?”. I was highly irritated by him and the way he was acting. We left that place and then rode back to through some lush green belts of forest and came back to Bangalore and reached home late evening.