Walk of Life...: Off to Hogennekal... A Drive to Remember

The Independence Day! The 59th for my dear nation… We decided to celebrate this with a trip to celebrate our personal independence. So we decided to start at 06:00 to reach a water paradise called “Hogennekal”, about 180 km from Bangalore.

Alarm rings, I wake up… only to see that the time is almost 07:00 and all my roommates are busy sleeping. We finally get going. As we pass Silk Board, we reset the trip meter and the time’s 09:00. So Me, Praveen aka PRV, Ragul & Joseph were out for a day of fun.

Da Gang

We hit Hosur road, usually cluttered with traffic moving at snail pace, but on this holiday, it’s as clear as a…?? Well it’s very clear :) And so the adventure starts.

The Clear Road

With our very own PRV (who we later christened “Shumy” for obvious reasons) on the wheel, we cruise at speeds in excess of 100 km/hr. Then the talk came up that he had touched a max speed of 140 on his lat trip, so we decided to better that…

Throwing caution to the winds, we sped forward, with all our eyes (except PRV’s of course) on the Speedometer. We touch 120..30..40..50 (Joseph’s camera goes “click” “click” incessantly). We hit 160 and that speed holds for quite a while, but even the slim traffic was enough to hinder us from moving forward. Then we hit a stretch, going downhill and also a clear road before us…

PRV hits the accelerator hard and 160..170 (click again)...171(click)… 175... click & bump. At that top speed, we hit a small hump on the road… and the whole pic goes for a spin… the photo at top speed is ruined… So here they both are. We later found out that our average speed for the last 50 mins was about 110km/hr.

Clicked at 171 km/hr

Click... Bump (175 km/hr)

We hit Krishnagiri, then head off toward Dharmapuri. We stop at a toll booth… and we were approached by a guard named “Rayappan”. He came in front of the car and started shouting looking at the car “Kappa Leema 0 1 Alpha Hotel 5 2 4 9”… and we were like “WHAT??”… It took sometime to register the fact that he was actually reading the license plate of our car (KL01AH5249). So much for the learned Rayappan :)

Mr. Rayappan

As we go forward, I get down at a place to ask directions… and my dear roomies just sped along… I was not amused… Thankfully for me (and for them), they stopped and we proceeded to Hogennakal. Then cruising along to Dharmapuri… we see green fields and lush background. We couldn’t help but stop and take some pics… it was fun. Then I lay on the road and took a pic (I always wanted to do that).

They Ditched Me :(

Lush Green Fields... enroute

The Multihanded Persona

On the road again...

On the way we saw a guy in a Black Santro, with 3 girls in it… The dude was trying to impress them by trying all kinds of antics on the car… He sped past us, accidentally awakening the Schumacher in PRV. Then it was a true F1 race (complete with a pit-stop at the toll booth), we zoomed past them… with PRV driving like a seasoned pro (though we thought he went mad). See a part of the zippy ride (PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!)