It has been 4 months since I got back from my Ladakh ride, not even 1 month since I got back from my Wayanad ride and here I am planning my next ride ;-)
Ever since I got back from the Ladakh trip in June 2008, something has been gnawing at the back f my brain wanting to do another big ride. Nishant Jha, who rode along with me to Ladakh, was another main reason for this craving of mine. The bugger was doing rides every alternate weekend and that too to amazing places (Chail, Landour, McLeodgunj).
As if this was not enough, Deepak who had ridden to Ladakh with me as a pillion on my bike asked me the same question everytime we met (Every Friday) “Agle trip pe kab ja rahe hain hum?”
Enough was enough. The situation was getting out of control. I had to do something.
Well the next ride for me is going to be a West Coast Ride. We will begin in Daman and ride down to Kanyakumari and later end up in RM09 in Ooty. It all began with me being put on "Bench" at work. Loads of free time at hand and very little to do. I started taking my Eicher Road Atlas and Indian Map Services mapbook to work and looking it up in combination of www.mapmyindia.com. I charted out a route where I would start from Bangalore Ride up to Goa and then down the West coast to Kanyakumari annd then up the East Coast til I reached Vishakapatnam. In my final leg, I would ride back to Bangalore via Hyderabad.
This seemed to be an awfully long ride and so split it up in to 3 rides, East and West Coast rides. Wow I felt like Vasco De Gama or Ferdinand Megallen now ;-)
This was when Nishant (fellow rider from my Ladakh ride) called me. When we were finishing our Ladakh ride, he told me that he planned to do a Rajasthan ride in Jan and asked me if I would come. I agreed. Then he told me that he and couple of friends of his would be intended to do a West Coast ride. Since I already had my route ready, I shared it with him and he was ok with it. Unfortunately his friends dropped out. So since it was just us both and of course Deepak, we decided to also plan it in such a way that we would wrap up the ride with RM09. This is going to be the 1st Rider Mania for both of us!!!
Then Jha was talking about this trip going to be quite an expensive trip so I got about making a rough estimate of this trip. His ball park figure was around Rs. 40-45k. It is easily going to be around Rs. 30k. I know because I did a rough estimate.
Jha told me that JK and Mat would not be joining us on the West Coast ride. JK will be moving permanently to Australia next year and so could not come. Mat would be riding with his Bullet Club to RM09. So we were on our own. Bad because I strictly believe in policy “The more, the merrier” :-( but in a way good for us as we would need to work through our problems by ourselves and so we would learn...:-)
Keep watching this space for more updates!!!
