BTS Ride

Sunday (17/06/2013), after a long time, I chanced upon travelling in a BTS bus. Holiday with an overcast weather boded well for a pleasant experience and indeed it was. While on the bus, I gathered that there was a bus fare hike active from previous midnight. It was about 1 rupee for a short trip and 2 rupees for long distance. I was unsure of these figures though. What drew my attention was : what started as a discussion on this hike amongst 3 or 4 co-commuters got heated up and led to near protesting. They were very boisterous. Hike apparently had hit them hard, one of them even wanted to join a protest rally if there was one.. But, for me, I was so …smug. I found the whole noise and acrimony embarrassingly amusing and I was (ashamedly) cold to their sentiments. One rupee hike wouldn’t dent anything for me. These people looked regular commuters and certainly not from abject poverty class! Well, so evident for me was impact of ”2-edged sword” of capitalism . It favours and pampers few like myself and disfavours many like these people and apparently here in India, is driving a wedge, widening gulf between the” haves “and “have-nots” .How long before, at least the “sufferable disparity “arrives?? Will I live to see the day?? I doubt it!

Jism 2

Jism 2.

“Why did you even have to come this way? There is a good route somewhere else! This is no route” said someone who appeared to be senior man in a  group of people sitting at the road junction of the village when asked about the directions to  SatyaMangalam (SM). Bemused bystanders there  chipped in enthusiastically to our enquiry. Then, the same senior man, perhaps, saw the adventure glint in Deepak’s eye and said smilingly that we  could  still reach SM on  motorcycles but be cautioned  that a stretch of more than 10 kms  is just  mud track. In fact, that advice turned out to be an understatement. More than 20 kms of road was plain 4WD track. Our man probably wanted us to do this course just for fun of it. I thank him for not demoralizing us at that point. That moment , I really didn’t want know how far was SM. Forest road ahead was so appealing that  we just wanted move on. We knew it was a roundabout trip to SM and we realized it more so on our way back in the regular route. Anyway, for us” Jism-2” started from here.

This route, for about 100 kilometres,  is sheer jungle barring few hutments of 2 or 3 villages in the valleys between hills. I still cannot figure out this route on Google maps (perhaps, the genius in Guru did it).In the commotion and lack of foresight I forgot to switch on my GPS too.  The names of the tiny settlements are missing in Google map and I cannot remember them from what I heard from the people while asking directions there. It looked a utter “no man’s land”. Incidentally, the bikes handled very well. They did serious off-roading in spite of not being generic model for the purpose. At one point, we were in the middle of jungle and we had covered quite distance on 4WDtrack and stopped: got off our bikes to chat about it. It was quiet around and then, we heard a loud noise: a roar or may be a grunt, probably of an elephant. We looked at each other sensing the seriousness of the situation. There was a road ahead of us: again, it was a climbing jeep track with plenty of gravel and the bikes were on stand. No way could you rush off on bike if there was an elephant attack. I still don’t know what we would have done if there was one. Probably in a situation like this “luck favours the brave” model works. It worked then, even though we were disoriented with fear. Anyway, we managed to move away from that place without any incidents. Later, it was same off-roading on this  200kg bike with limited manoeuvrability  for another about 2 hours( how I wish I had my Duke200 then).  I have never seen so many elephant dungs in one day so far counting in my limited trek experience. There were dried to fresh fuming ones. This area seemed to be dedicated to wild life, a kind of de facto reserve area: the road roads are left untouched by the authorities. There were no signs of repair either. Only the borders of the road had bike paths typical 4WD tracks. We never saw any vehicles apart from few Splendors for nearly 3 hours in this core of the jungle area.

Time just flew. Huzefa and Deepak remained spirited throughout. In fact, I was fatigued:perhaps my age is catching up. I have to mention what Huzefa said towards the end this ride “I love my bike even more now”. Obviously, he was referring to its remarkable performance in a territory alien to it and I couldn’t agree with him no more.

I haven’t seen the movie Jism2 and I wonder if it was as adrenaline packed as this ride.