Drift & Slide while you Gaze the Stars – Night Off-Roads
Off-Road trails are very intense and interesting, unlike the usual highway rides where you get glued to the throttle and eat away, off roads trails give you a sense of connection that you have with your bike. It puts your riding skills to a test and lets you understand how well you can carry and maneuver your vehicle on a mixed bag of terrains.
RT Hyderabad has always associated itself with Off Road. Thanks to Varun Bhai, our rides; always had a flavor of off-Road no matter what. Intentionally or Unintentionally we ended up on off-road during the majority of our rides. We’ve done off road so much so that the time of a day doesn’t define our boundaries for the off-road madness. Since its summer and we have our usual custom to do night rides, we decided to mix night ride with an off-road trail this time around.
We had about 25 riders joining us & we kicked off the ride from Decathlon, Kompally which is one of our regular meet-up points and traveled towards Shamirpet via ORR which is like 20 km away. The off-road trail location which we selected had a mixed bag of Sand, rocks, gravel, hill climbs, and mud. All the riders were very sensible with their speeds and the marshaling was top notch throughout the ride making sure nobody was left out.
Trouble and adventure come hand in hand, the very first adventure of the trail came from none other than Varun himself. A big pool of swampland welcomed Varun and his rear wheel got stuck in the mud, riders who were in the frontline immediately jumped to help him in, little we know about this particular swamp that our fellow riders were getting stuck. Buffa (Vijay) got stuck in swamp pit in the process of dragging Varun’s vehicle, he had swamp covering him till his lower thighs and he was dragged like a gazelle out of that pit. Later Varun got out by a bunch of folks dragging his vehicle out of that swamp. Turned out that the continuous rain we had for a couple of days made the barren land into pasty mud and the heavy weight of our vehicles was getting pulled in.
It is then we proceeded further and ended up at “No man’s land”. We didn’t know where we all were, there was no map that could help us navigate to the destination point, we basically kept wandering here and there to find a trail that could lead us to somewhere at least and then trouble #2 kicked in. Sai Kiran, who was riding a KTM Duke 200 had a battery problem, the vehicle refused to start and whenever there is any breakdown Mr. Fixit, Praveen Patkar the new admin of RT Hyd comes to rescue.
Patkar and Gundeep have manually pushed the bike in 2nd gear like our Indian way of starting bikes and tadaaaaa, the bike kept roaring like a lion in the forest. It is then we decided to proceed further and with the vicinity of our eyes we could see the main road and luckily we found a trail that leads us to the point where we all started our ride.
We thought the adventure was all over, but nature had a gift for us. An unprecedented rain hit Hyderabad at that time and all of a sudden, a Summertime night off-road ride turned into a monsoon ride. With over 25 bikers, blinking hazards lights in a straight line during heavy rainfall, it was a visual worth framing. We’ve all been extremely careful while riding in the rain and as we came close by our destinations, the intensity of the rain kept increasing so much so that we could barely see anything. With no troubles or any breakdowns, we made to Central Park drive-in near Kompally where one of our RT Women (Sarvani Kota) had started with her new venture Pulao Capital which served delicious pulao.
Overall, it turned out to be an unforgettable ride with an adventure worth cherishing for a very long time. We’ve been through sand, mud, grass, gravel, rocks, water, highway, countryside roads, trails and last but not least a heavy rain. A one of a kind adventure.
A beautiful write-up by Ravindra Sharma Bhai (RT Hyderabad)
Few pictures from the Ride:
Cheers,
Compiled by: Gokool Kini
(RT Blogging Team)
Also visit: RT Pune’s Ride to Veer Dam
Also, watch the Night Off-Road V-log here