Monday, March 12, 2007

Galibore: Offroading through jungle to Cauvery

It was almost a year since I did any good offroading. Oh no! I am not counting in the near - offroadings on the broken roads! Otherwise I did ride on pretty bad off roads in my ride to Goa last year, blame it on the rain Gods there were only the remnants of the roads in some parts of the highways (NH included!).

So this time I was expecting around seven eight people to join in. However in the morning time when I tried to give wake-up calls only Amit and Jumbo picked up. Others were dead-in-sleep!

The previous evening I had finished installing my sigma speedo computer on my motorcycle and I was excited for testing it on the roads. Before this ride, we had left punctually on the time but this ride became an exception. I reached the meeting point to find nobody there. Waited till 6.20 when Jumbo arrived. After that it was a long wait for Amit. We decided to wait for him as otherwise he would be riding all alone to catch up with us, otherwise we do not wait for the late comers - they are expected to know the route from the posts and catch up later. In the waiting time I clicked a couple of snaps. Here is sooper-wide-angle shot by me at the reflection in Jumbo's pulsar visor:



Amit reached a couple of minutes later and we pushed off.

Kanakpura road was pretty open at this time. And soon we covered a few kilometers and stopped for breakfast. Tasty but spicy idlis followed by a tasty dosa/tea. After the breakfast I opened up the throttle, I had to see the difference between the stock speedo and the sigma speedo, could not reach the max speed though. The highest recorded on sigma was 98.4 kmph and at that time the stock speedo was showing 104 kmph. Mech errors!

I reached Kanakpura and stopped for the others to reach while using another function in the sigma - stopwatch ;). Amit reached after 7 minutes and jumbo reached after 10 minutes. We bought some fruits and water in Kanakpura and after that Mutatti was the destination.

We reached Mutatti from the halgur side. Unfortunately I had not known that Mutatti was the same place referred to as Bheemeshwari by us :D!! That realization occurred when I reached Cauvery fishing camp, Bheemeshwari! It costed us riding in very bad roads for around 10 kms.

Another interesting bet was that we pronounced "Galibore" in a 'Galley - bore' firang tone which the locals had never heard of! I thought I would call up PKM to ask for directions; but no network coverage!! What to do now? Shall we relax at some place near Cauvery? Or shall we ride to some other place? The disappointment was building up as it seemed our offroading programs were ruined... Almost.

Bingo! Amit knew Kannada and shortly afterwards he found out from the guards in Cauvery fishing camp where Galibore forest was! And to our discovery the world Galibore is pronounced as "Gaadi boray" and that is precisely why we were not getting any signs of recognitions from the locals! So we went ahead of Mutatti, confident this time, and there it was! By the way some very nice roads between Mutatti and Bheemeshwari Cauvery fishing camp.



The offroad began with the three of us and a couple of biker boys ahead of us having pulsars, splendor, Kinetic (!! Yeah :D), and one scooter! Well it was hardly 300 meters in these roads that the kinetic enzgine sputterred, I overtook.. and then Amit.. and jumbo.. Soon we overtook the leader of the biker boys crowd who was on a pulsar.. After that the ride was a bit peaceful, else it was all gung-ho in the jungle! Needless to point out - these guys were least bothered about anything - No helmets!




We reached Cauvery fishing camp in Galibore soon.From here one can keep on going to reach Sangam. However we didn't do that. Pretty happy with the off-road so far we decided to take the detours to reach Cauvery and ride on some sand ;). In this process we turned back to take the first detour. Taking our bikes as far as we could we parked them there in the sand amongst the trees and went to the Cauvery.



Some peaceful moments here, relaxing by the river side and having those grapes, bananas, water and oranges was good indeed. The only thing lacking in this place was some shade so we decided to move on and take the second detour to find a suitable spot near Cauvery and have our lunch.

Getting the steeds out of that sand was really gruelling and when I had taken it out to the main portion of the road I heard Amit's honking! I stopped and got off my bike and went to check the situation.. As hopeless as he gets when I tease him, his bike was in the same condition with the sand. Both the tyres stuck deep in sand. I got on his steed and used his bike's power and a bit of twisting the front tyre to get the bike out and rode it out of that damn sand to where my bike was. Jumbo clicked a picture when I rode Amit's steed back to firmer terrain in the mid of the Galibore jungle.



The second detour was an ideal one and we got shade for our steeds as well as for ourselves.
The lunch was a quiet affair with the bread, cheese spread, jam, milk, cold drink, biscuits, namkeen and water. After having all this we lied down there on the stones ;) and had a good rest. The place was very quiet, not a soul around apart from the three of us!



Peace.. And relaxation..
By the time we checked our watches it was already 1.30 PM so we decided to head back home. The only tough portion was the off-roads in the mid of the day. It was damn hot riding with all the gear in the daytime! Morning time it was a fun ride, come daytime and the same ride becomes an ordeal!

Soon we were done with this portion after having clicked a couple of teaser pix for those who didn't make it to this ride ;) - R u one of those and reading? :D just take a look at a couple of pictures, we toiled hard to capture what you missed ;):





The ride back was good. This time no broken roads ;)
When I reached Sathanur I saw a couple of bikers in the side of the road and I spotted Mr. Goop, an RTMC fella, there. So I stopped to meet him. He was with his company biking mates back from a ride to Bheemeshwari. I moved on to clock some more miles in the smooth roads.
I waited at the Kanakpura entrance to catch up with Amit and Jumbo. After this Cauvery garden restaurant was the next and last stop.

We had tea and omelets there. Amit's footrest had got bent in a minor shake in the offroading so I did some 'kickwork' to make it straight and then it was a peaceful and cool journey back home.

I stopped my bike at my place at 4.30 PM!
Another great ride and a good off-road!

*****Ride stats*****
===============

Route (While going):
Bangalore - Kanakpura - Halgur - Mutatti - Galibore
Distance: Around 120 kms.
Not recommended though. After Halgur bad roads for around 10 kms.

Route (Coming back) Galibore - Mutatti - sathanur - Kanakpura - Bangalore
Distance: Around 100 kms
Take this road, mostly in good shape. And most of the portions in Kanakpura road are ultra smooth now. Relaid recently.

Photo links: Click here to see my pictures & click here to see Jumbo's pictures.

**Photo credits:
Kam/Jumbo

7 comments:

Mayank said...

cool

Prabul said...

Good snaps dude...wonder how you got clarity in that heat!!

Chandra said...

I loved reading this write up :)
Great ride... I must say that I missed it :)

Adarsh said...

dude, I loved this writeup!!!!!!!!

Actually, this looks deja vu (http://100kph.fotopic.net/c594365.html)


Hope the adventure was worth the heat :)

-adarsh

Kam said...

Thanks all ;)
@ Prabul: Manual exposure ;)
@ Chandra: Yeah, u did miss it!
@ Adarsh: I checked your pix, too good I must say! You were there in the rite time. We had great fun, inspite of the heat.

Harish said...

Good snaps dude, but the roads seem worst........

Kam said...

Thanx dude ;) Generally we expect roads/no roads in offroading like this wonlee.. Hence the word 'offroad'.

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