Tuesday, August 30, 2016

The joy of wilderness - Camping ride to Shettihalli Church

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
 
“I will be back” this is what I said when I drove to Udupi , my hometown , in June . The rains had just started and already Shiradi Ghat was looking stunning with its evergreen vegetation and also the mountain streams everywhere  .
 
With the Independence Day long weekend , it was the perfect time to go on a photography ride , being a travel junkie , the Shiradi Ghat ride provides the perfect mixture of adventure and cruising experience  .With buttery smooth highway for most of the ride , opening up for gorgeous twesties complemented by its stunning views .
 
With the trip I had planned was a camping road trip it was just a perfect long weekend.
 
3 friends 2 of whom were on India’s fondest bike the Royal Enfield and me on my Pulsar AS200 set out on the 13th of August at 6AM , it being a long weekend the early morning traffic was bad until we hit the NH 47 , a near perfect weather greeted us and we were happily cruising , as usual I was hitting good speeds with me loving the AS200 the more I ride it , and Enfield’s were on their happy cruise mode. Soon after breakfast at Mayura we crossed Sakleshpur and I and Sree stopped for taking photographs .
 
 





At this point Deepak overtook us and we were not able to locate him for next few hours with me spending most of my time in photographing the waterfalls in the Ghats , with slight drizzle all along it looked incredibly beautiful and with no network , there was no trace of Deepak either . I and Sree decided to go to Sakleshpur and call Deepak to the hotel were we decided have our lunch and as I stopped to give a one last call to him , Deepak came along just to say he had went ahead some 70kms as the roads looked beautiful. Reminds me of my old riding days when I used to ride without an agenda.



 

 
 
After our lunch at Sakleshpur , we headed towards Shettihalli Churh on the backwater of Hemavathi Dam , that’s where we had planned to pitch-in our tent ,  I was not very eager to pitch the tent near the church and wanted to pitch-in anywhere along the long stretch on the backwater's .As we approached the abandoned church we could find lots of places ideal to pitch in tent . We spent some time near the gorgeous bridge built across the backwater connecting Shettihalli to other villages , the sunset was beautiful that day and after spending some time we went to our camp area and quickly set up the tent .







Just as we settled in , a couple of villagers came in to tell its not safe to pitch in the tent , we knew those guys were delightfully high and did not mean what they said , we exchanged a few friendly gestures and the rest of the night was spent well with loads of ride stories and some night photography experiments.
We dozed off at around 11PM and at midnight it started pouring. Morning the view from my tent was beautiful , we spent some time listening to songs and clicking few photographs and soon we saddled back to our return ride to Bangalore. On the way, gave a visit to the famous ruined Shettihalli Church and by 9am we hit the highways and reached home safe. A truly beautiful camping ride.


Until next time , be safe and god bless.