Road Trip - 1 (Bangalore)

Hey Folks,

This trip was our first of the many yet to come (hopefully) road trips.

We went to Bangalore for a friend's wedding reception. We were there for a very short while but we had a lot of fun.

We started off from Hyderabad on 20th August 2009 (Thursday) at around 5.30PM to Bangalore in Sudhi's car. The road was good for a while, the national highway-7 and the outer ring road. But after a while, the road started to get narrower and dirty. At one point of time, we could not see a thing on the road because of all the bugs that were crushed on the windshield. We could not proceed further on until we cleaned it. And then Bhanu became the cleaner. Here is a pic of that. The stuff on the windshield was really smelling bad, I really have no idea how he cleaned it all.

Then we moved on ahead till we could not travel anymore because of lack of light and for our own safety. We reached Anantapur at around 11PM for a night halt. We resumed our journey to Bangalore at 5.30AM the same day. On our way there, we stopped at Lepakshi to see what's there. Here Ravi had a vision of one of his past lives come back to him. Then it seems that he was Krishna Deva Raya, where his supposed "cheli" was running in the corridors (God knows why, prolly running away from him :D )

Here we recorded a lot of videos of Ravi describing what's what. But sadly we never saw any of those videos till date. (i'll give u a hint - Ravi deleted all of them and forgot about it completely)

And then we resumed our journey to Bangalore (again). This time, we stopped at Nandi Hills for a view. I wouldn't say it was great, but it was not that bad either. And after that we resumed our journey to Bangalore (this time for real). We couldn't figure out where to go and whom to ask for directions. We could have had a lot of trouble if it wasn't for Sudhi's phone with the GPS. We then spent the rest of the day sleeping and attending the wedding reception which was the actual reason we went to Bangalore.

The next day (21st August, 2009) we started to Mysore, and Ravi was driving. Let me tell you something about his driving (he is reckless). There were a few speed bumps on the national highway (that is how it is in Karnataka), and this guy went as if the bumps did not even exist. After three such speed bumps, we had a flat tire in the middle of some village. While trying to replace the flat, Ravi instead of unscrewing the nuts, put the wrench so as to tighten them and jumped on it. And the result is the pic to the side.

When we reached Mysore, we took the car to the service center to get it repaired. We took the local transport to go to the Mysore Palace. We roamed around in the city for a while till the car got repaired. Upon someone's saying, we then went to a place in the Coorg District called Madikeri.

Coorg is an entire district most of which has hills and hill stations. There was no cell phone reception, so the GPS could not help us much. We somehow managed to take a route which is not the actual route to Madikeri. The drive was excellent. It was raining and we didn't know the route and were on a ghat road which was covered in fog. So, basically the experience was awesome!!


We reached there at around 9PM. We were confused about what we had to do. Go to Mangalore or stay back in Madikeri. Ravi mahaan suggested that we drive to Mangalore, but the rest of us veto'ed it. So we stayed back there for the night. We were so tired that we had our dinner and slept like logs. The next day (22nd August, 2009) we started driving back to Hyderabad at 5AM. We went to a place called Abbey Falls on our way. Now, this is a nice place to visit (when there is water, of course). Some of our seniors went there in the summer and were utterly disappointed. So, readers please note that point.

We eventually reached Bangalore in the afternoon. Had lunch at a friend's place and started to Hyderabad again. NH-7 is a bad road to take when there is no light (this was when we went, now it has improved a lot). There were a lot of diversions in the middle, which were not properly marked. We were at quite an awesome speed when we saw a pile of rocks and other stuff in the middle of the road (which were an indication to take a diversion). Thanks to Sudhi, we somehow averted it and saved our a**es. We finally reached Hyderabad at 1AM on 22nd August, 2009 which concluded our road trip.


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