Numbers: 10 bikes, 1 car. 16 ppl, ~350 KM oneway. Cost: Fuel, about 20 Ltrs for round trip in most bikes. Food (about 100 Rs per meal). Accomodation (350 per head 2 days, AC :))
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
Now the details: We left at around 6:15 PM from Google office at Kondapur, Hyderabad (yeah bad timings, but we signed up for it :)). Soon as we reached Madhapur it started raining and got worse over next few minutes. There was some chaos because of the rains and before we could get to the petrol pump at road number 12 at least some of us weren't in the group anymore. After some confusion and stuff we finally got together at MPM mall at abids and started the ride again this time getting out of the city. It turned out the rains have slowed the traffic much further causing lots of roads being jammed, fortunately bikes could take the alternate muddy lanes and continue. Ultimately when we stopped just outside the city we had spent about 2.5 hrs and gone about 49 KM and most were pretty badly soaked.
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
The ride went quite fine after that, we stopped over at two three places in search of dinner finally managed to get food at the "Pal Punjabi Dhaba", which was pretty good. The rain had mostly stopped and riding speeds improved, though very soon we came to a single lane highway.
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
At around 2:00 AM or so came the first surprise of the trip, my bike's front tire got punchured. I was definitely among the less prepared ones as far as these surprises were concerned. Finally Ram and others managed to find a mechanic guy to come to the place where we halted and then the whole wheel was taken out and taken to a nearby shop for fixing the punchure. It took about 1 hr and 15 minutes before we could get back to start, just to realize that the car's battery has drained as they kept the indicator on all the while :D. Some pushing the car and we were back on the roads.
Besides this the onward journey didn't have any more unexpected stops and we reached our destination by about 9:15 in the morning taking enough breakes during the night and speeding quite a bit as the dawn came.
We had already decided to stay at Vodarevu because the only accomodation at Suryalanka, the Suryalanka beach resort by APTDC didn't have any vacancy so we went to Vodarevu and stayed at Vamsi Krishna Guess House the same place where we stayed in our last trip to Voderevu.
After resting for some time we decided to go for lunch to Bapatla which is about 12 Kms from Voderevu. Lunch was at ShreeGodavari restuarant, the non-veggie loved the prawns but the veggies like me didn't have a great experience with the meals.
Post lunch we went to SuryaLanka beach which is just 5 Kms from Bapatla, it was a nice ride and the beach was great too. Suryalanka is considered much better destination then Voderevu as the beach is cleaner and more targetted towards tourist compared to later being more of a fishing beach. I didn't wanted to lose the chance of getting in to the beach and went ahead alone spending some 10-15 minutes having fun with the waves before we decided to head back to Voderevu.
After we returned Ram figured out that we could take our bikes to the beach and ride them there. What a nice surprise! Most of us were super excited and went ahead and spent the next 1 or 2 hrs biking on the beach. Two of the bullets didn't like the salt water much and gave quite a bit of troubles to the riders, ultimately as it got dark we took back our bikes to the lodge and later came back to the beach for Bonfire.
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
The bonfire was another experience of its own, with the very breezy winds it took about an hour of consistent effort and abour 3 Litres of fuel(petrol ?) to get the woods catch the fire, as quite a few of us enjoyed the drinks and scenic view and some nice chitchat.
The next morning some of us had the lovely breakfast of idly/dosa which I am super fond of, the prices were unbelievable each idly 1 Rs and dosa 3 bucks :) We went back to the beach on bikes though we were too late for the earlier plan of watching the sun-rise from the sea reaching at about 8 AM instead of 5:30 or so. I got a perfect reflection photo of my bike with great struggle but unfortunately my friend deleted all photos by mistake, damn you.
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
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| From SuryaLanka Bike trip |
We left at about 9 AM or so back towards Hyderabad. The return journey was fun and exciting too as we had good rest in the night. There weren't too many surprises, Santosh's bullet had some trouble (which he got get fixed himself but we spent about 1 hr) and then Vivek's bike had a tire punchure. After taking our lunch quite late we started back for Hyderabad, we reached Narkatpally at about 7:30 PM. After which I would say we had about the toughest riding of the trip with just 1 lane road and too many trucks all the time. Our earlier target of cover the remaining 50 KM by 9:00 PM was soon to revised. Ultimately we reached outskirts of Hyderabad by about 10:30 PM.
This was my best bike ride till date and despite my earlier apprehension about driving in the night and all the risks involved it turned out to be wonderful. I am now looking forward to longer rides and seeing our photos many of my friends who missed it are now determined to come for the next one.
