Ramanagara(12-03-2006)

Damodar had come to bangalore (for some personal work), and Pradeep had come back from Korea. Whatelse can be a bigger reason to celebrate? But we were bored of the usual way... it was enough of forum/garuda or 4th block. So we decided to go to Ramanagar. Damu also didn't have a taste of mountaineering/Rock-climbing.
Sunday morning myself, damu, Pradeep, Vasant and Sandy set out on a Pulsar, Fiero and a Yamaha 135. Recently the Mysore Road has been converted to 4 lanes and the road is in good shape.
It didn't take us more than an hour(including the 20 mins at Kadu mane restaurant) to reach the railway crossing near Handigondi(not a surprise.. as the bikes never went below 100kmph). At such a speed, the pineal riders were literally crying and covering their ears from the deafening wind(myself and damu).
Just before Ramanagar, near Handigondi village, there is a huge monolith. It attacted us. We decided to climb it. It is the same monolith on which there was a proposal to carve 1050 ft Buddha statue.
The ride upto the hill base was very bumpy and a challenge to our bikes(beasts). The last stretch was kind of mountain biking.
We scaled the mountain from the side which is fairly challenging to climb. Scrambling through shrubs... and crawling through rocks...the climb didn't take us more than an hour(with rests inbetween). The view from top was superb. The mountain top was covered by fairly dense shrub forest and grass.
We spent some time below a huge overhanging rock chatting and eating. The pictureperfect views of rocky mountains made us dumbfolded. Every mountain seemed to be provoking us to scale it!!
We didn't want to go back so early, but since Damu had a lot of appointments... he had to reach Bangalore by 2pm.
Our backward journey started by 1pm. The path down seemed to be well treaded and it didn't take us more than half an hour to reach our bikes.
We refreshed ourselves at a stream near the village and set out to bangalore... with tears in our eyes!!!