skandagiri

It was around 8:30 PM and i was watching NDTV 24*7 at my sister's house in Bangalore, when i was alerted to a message by a friend.. het dude, skandagiri 12 PM, coming, eh? Me lazy bugger, who wouldnt otherwise move my ass around the corner pulled up my socks in a jiffy,had all the chow in a gallop,and set off to tumkur. it takes an hour and a half during the wee hours to get to tumkur.i got to my room by 11P M.My bike was at the far end of the stack that forms the parking lot of the apartment building.. decked behind were 2 bikes, a classic enfield and a yamaha rx 135, both owned by my fellow floor mates. And to get my bike out, i had to do the herculean task of pulling the bikes behind, out of the shed and put them back in over a 60 degree ramp. by the time i had my bike out, it was 11:30 P M. i set off to the hostel from where we were to depart at 12 as per schedule. We had to reach the view point b4 sunrise.Thanks to all the hoopla over who is riding pillion with whom, we were an hour behind time, even before we left.And to add to our woes, most of the dozen bikes that we set off on were starving for fuel.finding a gas station in tumkur at the middle of the night is no child's play. they would be either closed or unattended.at last, we found one, woke the guy up by honking and had the fuel..
skandagiri is around 100 km from tumkur amd the trek to the top would take around 2 hours.. we were running late and i generally dont like to rip my 1500 km old bike. a stretch of the route was infamous for burglary and discourteous.i maintained a steady 60 to 70 all across, sometimes falling to the temptation of speeding.. a 150 cc pulsar beast and self control are hard to get along. we had our share of untoward incidents.. a fall after a speed breaker went unnoticed and a bashing from patrolling police yelling at the 12 bikes speeding past.. overnight drive had sucked a lot of energy.. and i am not particularly a good mountaineer. acrophobia only adds salt to spice. i used to sit down after every few hundred meters, closing my eyes, unwilling to see the valley from the precarious position we used to rest. somehow, we were at the hilltop by 5:30. the sun had not rosen, and we had made it, just in the nick of time. make it a point, if u go climbing somewhere, do carry a lot of water, especially if it is a summer! i shelled out 30 bucks for a litre of water, and heavens know if the water packed in the mineral water bottle was indeed mineral water. whatever, it assuaged the thirst and thats all that mattered at the hour.
we had higher expectations, going by the snaps we had seen of other people's trek. we realised, summer is probably not the right time to skandagiri. sunrise was good, but we were expecting clouds.. all in all, it was fun, the drive atleast. by the time i got down, i was busy bitching that this place does not deseve so much of climbing. spent some time at the parking point, taking some rest and got back to the hostel.

The year that was.

2008 will go down the books as one of the swell years of my life history.. Everything was so close to being perfect. Sister got engaged in feb. I put my name on the TCS placed list in april. I found my professional love for 2 years, SASKEN in july with a lot of twists. Sister got married in december and for the year ender, i booked my pulsar dtsi.
Looking forward optimistically to the new year, though few things can pip
the utopia 2008 was.