When I woke up in the morning,
the bus was somewhere near Mettupalayam. And the bus was going uphill. It was a
really slow ride, and we wondered, if the bus were to take so long, when would
we reach Munnar on a cycle? Finally the bus stopped, and we put our cycles back
together. Ooty, or Udagamandalam on the boards there, was cold. Luckily we’d
brought our jackets and were already wearing two layers inside.
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| Teja in Gear! |
The first 2 km were totally
uphill. We were already panting by the time we reached up one peak. We stopped
here, loaded our bottles with electral, stuffed our ears with cotton, covered
our mouths, put on the goggles and began the downhill ride.
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| The tip of the uphill ride |
Swoosh!! The ride that
followed had to be the best possible ride ever! Averaging at more than 40 Kmph,
and touching 55 every now and then, we left all the motored vehicle drivers
stunned. None of them were spared, all of them had to face the humiliation of
being overtaken by cyclists. We stopped at Coonor, about 20 km from ooty, and
we came that distance in less than 30 min. After an awesome authentic south
Indian breakfast, we started off again.
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| The typical south Indian breakfast |
The joy of riding downhill was
so much, that we forgot, or should I say ignored to look around and appreciate
the hilly beauty. You never start pedalling from the top gear, but here it felt
the chain was always derailed! Not once there was a need to put an effort from
our side!
The side of the road cleared all of a sudden and the view that it brought out was breathtaking.
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| The momentary distraction: Root of the first setback |
First setback came along.
Ajay’s bike slipped over from the edge of the road and he somehow managed to
tear off the rear of his jacket, bruise his left ear and get a cut on the left
temple. It’s difficult to picture how he’d have crashed, but the first time I
saw him, blood was oozing all over from his temple onto his jacket. And his ear
didn’t look any different from an over-fried bajji. It was a bad fall, imagine
the Kinetic energy of a 80 kg object moving at 40kmph, being absorbed in just
one impulse by the body. Ouch.
His vision after the fall was
a bit blurry, so we had to slow down.
Till we reached the foothills,
life couldn’t have been better. But reality struck us hard when we came down on
the flat roads once again. Heat was high, the road was bad, and it was dusty,
very dusty!
Ajay’s cycle wheel was
wobbling after the fall, so we stopped at every cycle or motor repair shop on
the way. But none of them had any clue on how to work on the imported bikes. We
had no other option, so we kept trudging along.
The outskirts of Coimbatore
were worse than a barren village in Rajasthan. Sand, dust storms, traffic, and
the weariness from the journey concocted a really bad image about this place.
We hadn’t had lunch, so located a KFC, and relaxed there for almost an hour.
Once our tummies were full, we got a place to stay, and began planning
tomorrow.
We had covered 95 km today, in
about 5 hrs.
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