Wednesday, December 27, 2006

riding in the rain.

so suddenly my brother vikas decides to buy a cycle so he can get some exercise (but only after i i tell him a million times tht its lot of fun and tht he should go to his office by cycle :D). anyway so went and bought a road cycle. the difference between a road cycle and a regular mountain bike is that the mountain bikes have a straight handle and lot thicker wheels. there are basically three types of cycles (that i know of) 1. road bikes 2. MTBs or mountain terrain bikes (if i'm correct, coz thts what i think is the full form) and lastly, 3.BMX (i dont know the full form but its the one with lot smaller wheels and smaller frame)

the road cycles have very thin wheels. meant only for plain tarmac roads and very hard to drive on rough terrain. they have very thin tube and tyres which often get punctured if u drive on too much rough terrain. they have the characteristic curly handle bar meant to give a posture that reduces the air friction or drag which slows u down a lot if u encounter wind against ur direction of cycling.

the mountain bikes have a straight handle and their design has no consideration for any wind resistance. they arent supposed to be fast but their advantage is that u can drive on almost any road or dirt or rocks, it doesnt matter at all. they have lot thicker tyres and the straight handle is easier to control at slow speeds.

the last type i know of are the bmx bikes (can't remember the full form and too lazy to google it) which have lot smaller wheels and can be seen often on sport channels showing extreme sports. thats right. they were particularly designed for stunts. u can more easily do a wheelie and absolutely anything u're artistic mind is capable of but of course u have to pratice.

so finally road bikes= speed city rides, lot faster, mountain bikes= no need of road, not very fast and BMX= doing stunts, and breaking bones while trying to.

damn i was going to talk about the new cycle we got and ended up describing the types of cycles :p. anyway so what i wanted to tell was driving it in very cold weather which is now in gurgaon. so i had to go to some shop to get something. and nearest computer shop was about 7kms so took my cycle and it suddenly started raining. wow. usually i'm least bothers about rains but it was already very cold about 15°C and on top of that it started raining. it was jus awesome (yep even tht i enjoyed hehehe). my fingers were almost freezing. thankfully i was wearing a jacket which did give some protection and prevented me from getting wet. still was jus best really really cold. anyway my advice dont get wet in cold weather coz it gets very cold as ur clothes become too cold too soon. thats it for today. hope u enjoyed todays dose of useless khichdi. but hey thats what its meant to be. another waste of time :-p but i think i did tell something about cycles so may be it wasnt all that useless. come back for more khichdi soon, bye or now

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

chennai to pondicherry on cycle

dec 8th 2006
set on for a trip to pondicherry from chennai. its about 135 kms. and we thought it would be cooler to cover that distance on cycles. the guys whom i went with on the trip kiruba and shyam. they had done a longer trip a few months before from bangalore to chennai and yes on cycle. but for me it was the longest ever. the longest one before this was mahabalipuram which is about 45 kms from chennai.

so we started at 0500hrs from thiruvanmiyur bus depot. first 40 or 50 kms were no big deal and we werent feeling tired at all. we had breakfast somewhere before mahabalipuram. and only after riding about 70 or 80 kms did i began feeling tired. but we took frequent stops every 6 to 10 kms for 5 minutes or so. in the afternoon we had lunch and had a siesta for i think about an hour. and then kept going again. finally we reached pondy at about 1800. shyam had a speedometer on his cycle and it said our average speed while riding our bikes was about 20kmph. covering about 135 kms with about 6.5 hrs of riding time and about 5 hrs of rest time. which is quite slow that wasy but we werent in any hurry coz e had all the time. and besides it was jus for fun and not a race.after reaching pondy we stayed at a place about 7kms before the main pondicherry city. had a great dinner. then a nice sleep.

day 2 woke up and started for auroville a township just outside pondicherry city and about 8kms from ECR (East Coast Road, the chennai pondicherry highway also known as new mahabalipuram road). plan was to spend a day roaming after reaching there and take rest and start next day back to chennai. but after going auroville we couldnt come out it was quite big and too beautiful to leave. the architecture, the peace, the vegetation which was so dense and hard to believe that every single tree over 2 million of them was planted by hand one by one over past 30 years when aurovile began. and most importantly the people. you can talk to them whole day and never run out of things to talk about and their energy to talk never seems to decrease a bit. its hard to describe auroville, theres jus so much to tell about it . u can learn more about it from here www.auroville.org and here anyway so we were supposed to spend one day roaming there and come back cycling the next day. but it was so beautiful there that we decided to stay another day and after that we decided to stay yet another day and then finaly ended up coming back by bus after staying 3 days in auroville. met many people some of whom have lived from the start of auroville from past 30 years. there are many tiny places in auroville. and pathways connecting them. some of them are even non motorable. but our cycles can go anywhere so we didnt have any problem. someone was even kind enough to lend us a map of auroville. and it turned out to be most useful thing and we took it whereever we went. hard to go anywhere without it.
in the afternoon we went to a place called solitude where Krishna who mainatins tht place grows 95% of the food they eat in his beautiful organic farm. and we helped them in cutting grass for the cows they keep. and he showed us his farm and all the things he grows and techniques he follows. one of the things he said was tht the soil should be touched to minimum and trying to till it often only spoils the soil and takes longer to recover. he also showed us human waste decomposing tank where the wastes get deposited and are acted upon by bacteria and kept for about 6 months and then all the waste turns into manure. we even held it in our hands and it didnt even smell, it was jus like plain mud. then i climbed a very tall windmill. which was one of the scariest things i ever did in my life. it was almost 90° vertical and about three or maybe four storeys tall. was scared to hell climbing it but somehow successfully reached the top. Krishna came 12 years before to aurovile and built that place solitude. and plans to keep staying there for long time. he even invited us for dinner and we cooked on firewood using the vegetables from the farm. it was really nice spending time with them. the pics are in the album below. next day Kribs and I spent some more time exploring many new places and meeting new people before finally deciding to leave the heaven we'd staying from past few days. but we were out of time to come back on cycle so we put our bikes on top of bus and came back. it took us only about 3 or 4 hours to come back. but it was nothing like the 12 hour journey on day 1 :)

lots more info and pictures in the album below.

"A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu