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Me, My Machine and The Elements 2.0

I was expecting the second edition of the write up only at least one week later. The last weekend I was not planning to ride anything major, save a small ride to the outskirts of the city to make a version 1.5. But fate had different plans and I had to attend a funeral in Wayanad, Kerala. I am here to talk about rides, so I will write about the riding part of the story.

The grand plan was to start from Bangalore by around seven o' clock and reach the place by late night. But the invariable delays made us late, real late. First of all the bike could not be retrieved from the garage where it was given for a check up in time. Then the journey from Cox Town to Madiwala, for my friend to collect the bag and to get ready took us another eternity and finally when we finally tanked up at BTM and started off, it was almost eleven.

For starters, no, we were not on my own steed, it was a Thunderbird with Delhi license plates. That makes the title erroneous, you may argue, but this guy is a close friend of mine, and I am as comfortable on this machine as mine at any time. And I made the guy ride through the first forty kilometers as I hate to manipulate the heavy piece of equipment through the mess that is called traffic in Bangalore. Then I took over for the next sixty kilometers and we were changing hands every fifty kilometers for the rest of the journey.

The first stop was at the highway-side Cafe Coffee Day before Mandya. We swigged down cappuccinos and stretched in the bean bag sofa that they have out there. In the city cafs I always wondered about the purpose of such couches but here I found the utility of stretching your back while on the long run. I wanted to have a nice nap there but as the duty was calling, we got ourselves out of the place and set off again.

From here I noticed the dying human activities around the road as most people had started their nightly rest after a long day of hard toil. The road became more or less empty and by the time we reached Mysore, there were just trucks out there in the highway. And from Mysore, we had the dream conditions: a virtually empty road, smooth tarmac and flowing curves. From Gundalpet, where we stopped to have a final tea, we left the Ooty road and were on the Wayanad road, to ride into the God's Own Country.

Soon we were traveling through the deserted jungles of Bandipur and we saw a lot of animals crossing the road. We once stopped at a place where we found a lot of deers standing

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