Nice pics Nunnu,Its Rajni not Pan Vilas

Cheers
Biru

Rajni =
Pan Villas =

BIRU .. I GUESS THAT WAS PAV-VILAAS THAT YOU WERE FLAUNTING ON THE ROAD .. JUST LIKE ... "Baaraatiyoo ka swagat ... PAN VILAAS se kijiye" types ...
"aaak thuuu.... pichrrr....!!!"

cheerzz..
ride safe and wear helmets ....

Day 2

Here's the actual plan for day 2.

The day started off with a bang when alarms started going off in all the rooms but the one and only kapoor saab was able to make it to the bathroom for the usual morning duties. Yes kapoor saab is me . I was up at 400hrs dot so I had the bathroom to my self and could get ready nice and slow. Others were less fortunate. Alarms were going off four times and being put into snooze mode constantly. The only other sign that anyone else from the group was even partially awake was the constant humming and disastrous singing from Biru which I could hear from the ventilation shaft in my bathroom .

You can imagine the surprise on peoples' faces when they found me fully geared up while they were just about getting up. But then I'm used to keeping my gear on while riding around so no hassles there. I went downstairs to ready the bag and bungee cords and what do you know! The door was locked! The only way of getting to the bikes was jumping out the balcony onto a sand pit that didn't seem to inviting... So I knocked on the door.. More like kicked on the door to try and wake somebody up but even after 4 rounds separated by 15 minute intervals, there was no response... Finally on the last attempt someone heard me and opened the door and I walked out apologizing for the early morning racket only to find that the main door was locked too -__-. That took another 10 or so minutes while tea was being served.

Everyone was ready in another half an hour and after some tea and Parle-G we were ready to leave by 6. Everyone fueled up at a nearby petrol station and we were finally off for good by 630... Then began the early morning full of chill riding. Having anticipated it we were all under multiple t-shirt layers of insulation so it wasn't so bad riding that way. Daylight was still quite a while away but after passing through a few villages, the sky finally started turning pink. The roads were really good. Not unlike the descriptions I've heard but completely unexpected in such remote places where there are nothing but farms, villages and the occasional town. But of course, that is only to the tourist's eye... To a local there's a 'hang-out' spot right around the corner...

Pretty soon we had light enough for decent photography so everyone pulled over. Here are the results:








Show off

We were riding along at a steady pace when, at the horizon, I saw what seemed to be smoke. But this smoke behaved oddly. It would, quite literally, appear, disappear, shift it position suddenly, change in density and what not. We were heading right in its direction so I had a tough time keeping an eye on the road. It took forever for us to get near enough to make any sense of it and when we were a km or so away I realized - It was a huge flock of birds! . Not so huge as it was dense. They were flying about in the same space, changing their position, direction, density, etc. It was an amazing spectacle! I could never have guessed when I saw it from afar that it was a flock of birds!

We were closing in on Radhanpur by then and there were a lot of farms and a lot of birds around the area. The birds seemed to be migratory since one of them, in the process of flying perpendicular to the road, dropped really low to the ground and one of the guys almost hit it. A quick duck by the biker and a swift change of direction by the bird avoided a collision.

We stopped at Radhanpur for some snacks and as you can see, soon enough the full-fairing effect started influencing the locals:


Seen here: Biru enjoying explaining why the CBR with the weird exhaust sounds like bullet .

The CBR belongs to Shashwat and has a Leo Vince which, by the way, sounds awesome! Makes you want to rev the bike! We had a decent sized crowd and the fun part was that they were ignoring the CBR and gawking at the much bigger ZMR . The bullet got a little attention to but hey - full fairing is full fairing!

We joined SH220 (yes 220 ), which becomes NH27 at this point, and had the amazing Gujarat highways in front of us again. Traffic was thin enough to enjoy the beautiful scenery around the place. It was just plain land till as far as the eye could see. We were just about entering Kutch at this point. The white which occupied the horizon on front kept getting nearer and nearer and by this time, trucks were the majority of vehicles we encountered. We stopped at one place for some snacks but decided to eat later and moved on.



We encountered diversions every now and then and after passing through a couple of villages, fueling up, tightening a couple of chains, eating at Rapar we saw this:


The straightest of straight roads I've ever seen... It was fading into the horizon!!

Mindblowing I say!






All of that water evaporates in the summers and you have nothing but parched land...


Seeing this photo I realized that Ravan would've had a tough time being a biker .



All this happened here.

We spent the better part of an hour on this road, looking for smart angles, birds, etc. I made my way up and down half its length just enjoying taking in the surroundings which seamlessly melted into the horizon. I couldn't even begin to imagine how beautiful the stars would look at night! But then again, I couldn't begin to imagine how cold it would be either...

We joined up and carried on. The quality of the roads was consistent even though we had no white lines now. But that wasn't a problem since the only traffic was the occasional CD100 and a herd of 50 or so buffaloes/sheep or dogs who wanted to chase us to the ground... The road got narrower after a while and we reached a museum which claimed to watch over an actual excavated site from the Harappan culture's time... We decided to check it out while coming back but better ideas while coming back took priority so the excavation site was left unexplored, so to say...

A few kms later there was a signboard which said that there were border ouposts 4kms and 7kms away.


The blue signboard partially hidden on the left.

We decided to go straight towards BOP Karni and after a few minutes reached a point where the road ended abruptly and there were just these three buildings by the side with a few children playing around. We asked a local nearby about what lay ahead and he said that there was a river which wasn't dry at all. We carried on and had no roads to ride on now. It was all sand and rocks and construction material for future roads. Good change from the highways.



We reached a point in the 'road' where there were three different pathways. I went a few hundred metres into each to ascertain what lay ahead and if the condition of the road was anything to go by, the central one seemed to be the most used. So Biru and I went on ahead of the group telling them that we'd return in a while . After a few minutes of riding on pure sand, with pretty much zero traction, minimal turning ability and speeds which reached 15-20 tops, we realized that this would be FUN! So Biru tried calling the rest of the group by phone but no one was under coverage area so without much thought, we carried on .

It was just too much fun riding on this sort of surface - first time for me. After another 15-20 minutes of almost falling a few times (nothing scary though), we reached the border outpost. We parked on one side and walked on foot towards what seemed to be the river. A few steps later we saw the river:





It was a full blown ocean! Not the most beautiful sight I've seen but certainly a level up from the river I was expecting . We heard the others coming in soon enough.





Biru and I were too busy riding to take photos so I got them from the others and this is what we'd been riding on:











Makes you appreciate the efforts needed by the Dakar rally guys in the desert sections doesn't it?

So we were hanging out around the beach when the BOP guys called two of us ask a few questions. Biru and I went in. He asked us the usual question: where we were coming from, what the purpose was, how many people, etc etc. We sat around and chatted with the head for a while and learned that what we saw before us wasn't the ocean but just a run-off area. By March/April, all of that water would dry up and if there was no border security, you could just walk into Pakistan which was just 40kms away from that point... Refer this. The white line is the LOC.

And so started the photography...




Supposed to xBhp and the X was already there


Again.








Stealth photography .




A little timepass...



And as the sun started coming down, paranoid people started ranting about how we won't get a roof over our heads if it got too late. So everyone geared up, filled up some water from the BOP and made our way back the way we came. I sped off into the sand more confident this time and made my way back to the three huts we'd encountered earlier. From there three of us stopped at the museum we saw earlier but realized that if we could make it to the long-straight-road before sunset, we'd get amazing pictures. So the museum was left for another time and we hurried towards the long-straight-road.

We got there quickly and out came the cameras!








Sunset ka photo toh banta hai!


This was just the intro compared to what we saw the next day.

And that was the end of daylight...

We grouped up and rode back towards Rapar. Again, we encountered next to zero traffic and it was amazing to note that we could hardly see any of the scenery we'd seen earlier in the day. There was no note of the beauty that this place possesses... We carried on with my projectors irritating the heck outta everyone in front I'm sure . At Rapar, we stopped for some tea and snacks and after 20 minutes of group discussion, 2 teas per head, 6 packets of chips out of which Kakkar bhau had 3 I think, we decided to ride to Samakhiali and stop there for the night.

I got delayed a bit putting on my gear and the group had already left by then. So I got on my bike and started ripping in order to catch up and was at a Y-junction with both roads being highways when I caught a glimpse of red light which seemed to be moving at speed. That seemed to be one of the ZMRs (and indeed it was, I learned later) so I went that way, thanking my peripheral vision. I saw a lot of taillights in the distance so I stopped ripping and started riding at my own pace which was pretty good thanks to the amazing lights that the bike has . I LOVE my bike!

The group stopped after a while after Akash (the ZMR that was tailing the group) realized that there were only nine bikes including his. By that point I'd just about caught up with the group so we carried on...

We hit NH27 again and after 40 or so kms found our place for the night. We reached by 2030hrs or so. After gearing down, unpacking, freshening up a bit in the bathrooms devoid of toiled seats and running water, we made our way to the canteen inside the hotel for some bhojan which happened to be just as orgasmic as the previous night and that afternoon. With full stomachs, we made our way back to our rooms.

We invented a new game on this ride: Kakkar-polo. Its free for all, prison rules and everyone gets a ride. Of course nice people like Ninad and Biru never play this dirty as filth sport (NOT!) and the amazing part is that no longer how many darts you throw at Kakkar, no matter how many times you score a goal in Kakkar-polo, Kakkar bhai always stands up and wants more! Its like he's the Terminator! Only he's soft and pudgy...

Biru quite literally married him on this day, he was taken for a ride even while not on his bike and yet he was able to throw us off everytime .

So here's to Kakkar bhau - the official sex worker of the Kutch ride!


Notice the red flat behind his head? That's for the capture the flag game

Enjoying this ROK ride.. awesome

good log.... wanting to hear more of "biru n kakkars folklore"

awesome.. awesome.. awesome..
nicely narated there too.. waiting for Day 3 already

also please give a google map of what route you guys took after ahmedabad.. can make it in google map and paste link here..


ride on..

Awsome vivek... well written... day 3.. day 3.....

Nice pictures and log, 6 of us (me, Kakkar, Nin, Vivek, Saurabh and Akash) correct me if I am wrong got lost in the middle I had no clue how to get out I had only 1 thing in mind tail someone so that you don't get lost in the middle of white sand even if you do you cannot go back to the BOP camp, it was that confusing but it was very enjoyable, this is the first time I had done off roading on my CBR & yes I was scared of falling. Finally when we came out there was sigh of relief for me. There were three bad patches of stones, whenever I took the lead to enter the bad patch I came out last, it was like WTH.....

Mein bhi ... mein bhi.... i was also der with Nin....
At the point where we took u-turn ... a bull was running right towards us... and for a moment i thought that next day the newspaper headlines would read ... "10 entered.. 3 came out.... Dholavira consumed 7 riders... only bikes found...."

^^Nice one Inder

Very well written Kapoor sahab .Last few para's were too good .

Cheers
Biru

wow ... excellent and catchy narration .. loved the story telling .. n the pinch of spice that you had put in for every bite ... ... that offroading was like never ending and I actually thought at one point .. would it be
more fun on here on a KTM ..??
waiting for the 3rd day ... gt it on air ...


ride safe and wear helmets ...

Biru bhau! Put some of your famed folklore here for everyone to see! I can't even remember half the games of kakkar-polo we played!

The route for day 2.

The entire trip after that is here.

At least you read the last few if not every one of them

Awesome Kapoor Saab.

Abe salo, Padha ya nahi thik se ?
He wrote Leo Vince ka exhaust !

@Vivek : It's Yoshi

What the hell guys ! Day2 over already !! kapoor sahab dheeme dheeme...i wont be able to catch up..seriously !

I have about 309 pictures abd videos for day2 alone and 326 for day3..also 228 for day 4 and 4.5 !...all that have to be arranged and edited yet !

So i guess you should go at a pace like..Day2... Day 2.2..2.4 and so on...

I'l try my best to post pictures of Day2 by end of the coming week...so if you can please withhold your day3 log by next weekend..pls do...