A Bike ride to pondy ...

We (me and my better half) have been always dreaming

about a bike ride on the ecr. And when we were just 2 weeks

before our Leh trip (aug 10th), we thought this would be the
right time to test our stamina and give our bodies
some exercise. The thought came in just 2 days before the
weekend (28th, 29th july), and we were cool coz pondy was
very near by and we thought we neednt plan much for this
trip atleast ( considering the fact that we were already
doing a lot of planning for our leh trip ). But when we
tried calling all the decent hotels around pondy, rooms
were unavailable in most of them. And the few hotels that
had rooms were really expensive and din fit to our budget.

Advice #1 :- if you are going to pondy book your rooms
in advance atleast 2 weeks before ur trip. Coz all the
rooms are booked for all the weekends normally.

Finally we got confirmation for a room in a guest house
(ganga guest house). We consoled ourselves saying, in
the worst case scenario if we din like that place we
will find another one after reaching pondy, coz our high
point was to travel by bike. We din want to visit
too many places in pondy.

Our plan was to start on the 28th early in the morning,
Reach pondy as early as possible, find a place to stay,
take some rest, finish lunch, visit auroville (with in 10km from pondy)
in the late afternoon, visit the beach in the evening, back to the hotel,
get a good night sleep. Visit manakula vinayagar (famous ganesha temple )
temple and ashram in the morning, leave pondy at 11 and reach our place
in ashok nagar at 4 / 5 in the evening.

As per our plan we had given my vandi for service.
Got it back, it was looking great, "tank full ". Saturday morning
we woke up early in the morning took bath and left our place at 5
just when the light started to come. We drove at a moderate
speed, and we enjoyed the ride with the chill air blowing on to
our face. Both of us were wearing helmets. We stopped near VGP
for a few snaps. By that time it was 6.30 and we were hungry
and wanted to stop somewhere for breakfast, we were close to
mahabalipuram and there was a hotel called "hotel mamala" on
the main road just a km before mahabalipuram. We went inside
the hotel parked our vandi, settled down nicely only to find
out that there was no breakfast but they served only tea and
coffee at that time. So we started from that place and proceeded
in search of the next nearest hotel. We knew that there would
be a deviation in the road that would lead us to the heart of
mahabalipuram and we would have hotels there, but unfortunately
we missed that road. We went on and on and din find even small
traces of any eateires. But after 5 to 10 km, we found a nice
little shop and we stopped there to find ourselves among hot
delicious idlies and vada. And our bill was just Rs 20 for how
many ever idlies we ate J.We realised that it was our luck that
we din have breakfast in the hotel mamala and we missed the road
to mahabalipuram.

It was a cool ride, we paused on the way quite a few times to
capture the nice roads, the different shades of green on either
side and a few children on the road. Every turn was exiciting.

As we started early it was not hot at all, sun was just coming
out slowly. The full stretch of the road is done nicely, except
the last patch of 20 kms. We were covering 40 km in an hour,
we knew that we can do it slowly and steadily and we found it
to be very comfortable. We reached pondy at around 9:30. We called
up Ram international to find out that they had a single room and
we took it, coz we read that it was a decent place (yes we ditched
the guest house). We then went on to take some rest before we had
our lunch and started to auroville...

Happy Bikers ...

to be cont...