Bumpy Trail Bicyclists: Tour Diary

gurgaon 100km-brevet 2011 oct 1

this was the preliminary run for the first brevet event of N India - the T3 200km brevet of oct 15, 2011.

for this event and the next, i packed up my trusty old btwin sports one and brought it over in 2ac. got off at the station and assembled the bike. threw off the box, and rode down to kalkaji...

am with freshly assembled bicycle... at new delhi station

i overnighted at prithwijit guha's, who lives near nathopur, not too far from the start point. an owl at gurgaon the night before the ride

Jaskaran Lamba - on the open road to sohna. shot from over the shoulder...

sunrise near bhondsi

a little egret trying his luck at a pond

bicycling and caste

imamuddin, street corner biryani stall at nuh. imamuddin gets up at 3:30 to start the dum; by 6:30 he brings his two handis to the nuh crossing, so that early bird bicyclists can enjoy his beef biryani.

wherever i go, I try to interact with the locals. especially if they are on bicycles. i wish more bicyclists would do this, instead of riding aloof on their super-duper hitech bikes, as if they were flying on some higher plane and did not belong to this earth.

i say this even more so here because i met back with imamuddin two weeks after this shot was taken. by then, this picture and imamuddin's biryani had become quite famous among gurgaon bicyclists. so i asked imamuddin if he had gotten any bicyclists to stop by for his biryani. his answer - none.

either we bicyclists are too caste conscious, or we are not quite hungry enough... may be a bit of both, but my suspicion is perhaps that we also wear our caste prejudices quite strongly on our shoulders...

encounters with an elephant

at ghasera, this elephant was lounging across the road. the owner beckoned me over, hoping for some benefit....

two (relatively) non-polluting modes of transport:
* mode one: 6 hours to Gurgaon
* mode two: 1.5 hrs to Gurgaon
female elephant, 25 yo, name bagdoi. mahout is shankar babu. (Ghasera, Haryana).

petting the wire-brush flank ofthe elephant

humans are no match for the pond heron when it comes to catching fish... canal near rewasan

the beady-eyed indian pond-heron

I was riding with Jaskaran Lamba for much of the ride, though often enough i would fall behind taking pics, or ride ahead for some reason...

with Jaskaran Lamba at a mosambi stall in sohna. pic by manas.

jas lamba and i at the end... ; amit at end-station - at leisure valley park, gurgaon. ready to ride back to south delhi...

rediscovering tfn10 pal nitish Bajaj

NOTE: three bumpy trailers from iitk participated in the 200km brevet organized a fortnight later... read about them here.

html index automatically created on Wed Oct 26 22:57:53 IST 2011