The 3-day wild escapade.. Valparai-Athirapally-Munnar

Three days of straight super smooth highways, wonderful twisties, tea plantations, one dense evergreen forest to ride through, wildlife when least expected, waterfalls.. I needn't say more,it was heavenly. And i mean it!

Trip summary

Total kms: 1,600
Days: 3
Route: Chennai - Valparai - Athirapally falls - Munnar - Chennai

The men and their machines: Sridhar (Unicorn), Simman (fz) and me (P220)

Prologue

I am loving this season of adventure. I surely am. It all started with a spontaneous solo ride to Pondy one fine sunday morning. Then the solo ride to Calicut through the wonderful forests of wayanad, followed up by an exhausting trek on the new year's day. It wasn't over yet. A bigger thing was awaiting me. The road not taken during my last trip to calicut was haunting me. Pictures and travelogues of the valparai - chalakudy forest road (if you could call it that) never stayed off my mind. Even before the calicut ride could sink in, I had made up my mind. I was gonna do this. Simman and Sridhar jumped in at the idea. The preparations were in full swing - weekend calls over getting the riding gear, status of roads, best routes, et al. The plan was finalized. We would do Chennai - Valparai - Athirapally - Chalakudy - NH47 - Chennai. Day 0 was closing in. We decided to hit vellore on day 0 to gain some leverage on the next day. All set, I was just waiting for the clock to tick to 5 PM on friday.

Day 0

In retrospect, it seemed a longer day than the following three days, when we had actually muched a lot of miles. I was waiting for the evening, almost eternally.
Rather it felt so. The three of us finally assembled and were good to go after tying the luggage. The trip was on. It was almost 6 PM when we were out of the city. I am generally a little paranoid about night riding and not very comfortable with good speeds at night. So I decided to push ahead to make the most of whatever daylight was left. After giving refuge to varied species of insects on my visor and jacket, I finally hit vellore by 7 30 and pulled over before the sathuvachari flyover to wait for the guys to join in.

By the time we got together, had a dinner of plum cakes and bananas outside a bakery, and finished our futile search for a visor shop (sridhar had a tinted visor which, after the raid of the myriad insects, had probably become an opaque object), it was almost 9 PM. But everyone felt better and refreshed and came to a consensus to push till krishnagiri. We hit krishnagiri and wade through the streets of the small town to find hotel velan. Quite unexpectedly, the town was wide awake with women drawing coloured wavings (kolams) outside their houses on the eve of Pongal. It is past 11 30 when we finally get to crash. Long day indeed, but longer days ahead!

Day 1

It was almost 7 when we refreshed, checked out of the hotel and slowly made our way out of the town and tanked up. We decided to meet up next at The Thoppur a2b restaurant where we had planned to fill our tummies.This morning ride was a breeze. Sun rising slowly behind the hillocks, wondeful empty roads, a mild chill, it was
just the perfect setting to ride.

Post the stop at a2b, our next checkpoint was Bhavani. After a lot of discussions, we had zeroed in on the perundurai - kangeyam route to get to pollachi. We had also read in a forum about avoiding the NH47 after perundurai as 4-laning work was in progress. Salem - Bhavani was wonderful with even lesser traffic and a lot of arrow straight stretches. I refused to get below the 100 kph mark for most of this leg. After the meet at bhavani, we finally continued and derailed from NH47 to get into the 2-laned state highway towards kangeyam. After almost 450 kms of riding on no-nonsense 4-laned roads, the first few minutes were a tad difficult to adapt. After kangeyam, the road becomes wider and better as you join NH67 towards coimbatore. Probably halfway between kangeyam and palladam, the road meets a T-junction where you need to take a left and immediately a right to get towards Palladam/coimbatore. There is no proper signboard here (the board indicates a right turn will lead to 'pobgalur' but this same road leads to palladam/coimbatore) and you could easily get lost and proceed straight on Dharapuram. After a few kms from
palladam, the windmills came into sight. There were coconut trees swaying on both sides of the road lending the otherwise monotonous highway some beauty.

After a good lunch a pollachi, it was time to hit the hills. The afternoon sun was soothing as we crawled past the entrance of anamalai reserve - the beginning of the
climb to valparai.

Bring on the hair pins. One by one. I was loving it, no doubt! But some less sun and some mist would have added more to the milieu.

First upper views of Aliyar

The elusive nilgiri tahr did not show up anywhere during our climb, nor did the elusive-but-not-so-shy lion tailed macaques. I was disappointed more about the former as I missed a potential sighting during my ride to munnar as it was raining heavily then and the eravikulam park was closed. 'LTMs crossing, go slow' reads a signboard on the road. Funny but it has a lot of meaning. Recently there have been incidents of vehicles running over LTMs on the roads.

The last few kms towards valparai opened up wonderful vistas of lush green tea plantations. I was thrilled, I really do not know why, but am always excited by the sight of mountain slopes with tea plantations and the odd trees that hang in there for support to the tea plants.

Reached valparai by 4 and checked in into the 'green hills' hotel where I had called up and booked a room almost 10 days back. I walk in, tell the manager my name and he says 'No, none in your name has booked any room'in perhaps one of the most harsh tones I have heard recently. I told him the date, time, etc when I had called. He still refused blindly. I finally had to plead him for atleast an ordinary room as this was not an ooty with a lot of options to choose from. From my knowledge, this was the only hotel with secured covered parking facility. After being allotted a just about decent room, we got down to the restaurant to order some tea. there were atleast 3 waiters around (and just one other table being served) but none managed to come down to our table and take an order. We were puzzled after waiting for almost 20 minutes and decided to have that tea outside. Blame monopoly. It was sad. I was totally put off by the attitude of the hotel management and staff. If the government doesn't want to promote valparai as an active tourist destination, then why issue licenses to only select hotels? One
of those political mysteries. But this was a road trip. Things like this happen. We had to get back and do what we are here for. Soak in and enjoy and we started off to 'Nallamudi Poonjolai' village to do just that.

The first 2 kms from the town towards there was pathetic. Road was non-existent and we had to ride on stones. The road reasonably improved after that and we totally
loved the route. There were tea estates all around, as far as we could see, no tourists honking around in innovas and indicas, near perfect weather - though a tad hotter for the hills.

We spent less than an hour at the place watching the sunset and enjoying the quietness of the place. The carpets of tea all around were a feast for the eyes.

We returned to the hotel and decided to take a walk on the main road. Stopped at a roadside dhaba for a few hot bajjis and vadas. We felt something was missing. Oh ya, it isn't feeling cold. It feels like the chennai in december. But we couldn't believe it - we must be a good 3000 feet above sea level. We missed the mist and chill.

After dinner, we packed up our bags and prepared to hit the sack. Tomorrow is big. We ride the isolated 70 km forest stretch towards Athirapally.The possibility of
sighting some wildlife was not remote. No civilization or mobile signal on offer, this was going to be one engaging ride through one of the most dense evergreen
forests in the south. As though these weren't reasons enough to get the adrenaline going, Simman started reading out a story from the Jim Corbett collection that he
had got along. "The moon was in her third quarter and there could be several hours of darkness. After nothing happened for many minutes, I felt a gentle pull on the blackthorn shoots I was holding. No question now that I was dealing with a man-eater, and a very determined man-eater at that." Sridhar had probably slept but we were transported to the Kumaon of 1910, the era of man-eaters roaming around like stray dogs. Coming to think of it, it's ironic that today, the once-rich land of the big cats has to run vociferous 'save tiger' campaigns. We laughed at this fact but when we were in the last stages before getting into soporific bliss, all we could see in our blurred vision was a stealthy man-eater waiting in the shadows. The night fell. And I had wild dreams.


Read part II here.