17th October 2006 : Silvassa- Mumbai

The Blaze up in the pick-up vehicle...

At the Rediff office...
Still some miles to go....

Posing at the Daman beach...

17th October 2006 : Silvassa- Mumbai

Plans are made to broken, aren’t they?
With Mumbai just over 140kms away, we were in no mood to leave early and the laziness made us leave our resort quite late. Got up late, freshened up lazily, had breakfast like there was no tomorrow and the irritating job of packing up was done in over an hour’s time! And we paid the price for it – rode in full blown sun-heat once again but the awesome roads with beautiful scenery did make up for it to an extent. I have said it before and would say again - India sure is beautiful and with the Golden Quad almost up (visit www.nhai.org for more), it is a pleasure to ride highways like these.
Sunil and Vinayak jee (from Kinetic) had still not joined us and so the three of us, Sunny, Ashish and me rode towards Mumbai but not before Ashish’s Blaze gave away and the engine seized up midway! The engine had been making a lot of noise and I knew the problem – no engine oil, and it was confirmed once we saw the dry dipstick. Off came the entire luggage from the backup vehicle and with the help of the ramp (which we purchased from a scrap dealer in Delhi), we pushed the Blaze on to the pick-up vehicle and then stacked our entire luggage around it. Ashish choose to drive the pick-up and Sunny and me rode towards Mumbai to Milan International hotel, which had been arranged by Makemytrip.com, one of the co-sponsors.
I always had bad memories of Mumbai and hated it a lot for the traffic and humid weather. It took us hell lot of time (and patience) to negotiate through masses of humanity and vehicles before we could reach our hotel in Santa Cruz area. Thankfully it did have a secure parking for our machines but being very near to the airport, we knew night won’t be a silent affair, what with tens of aircrafts taking off every hour and so! The Blaze had to be sent to one of the Kinetic workshops but we also had to visit the head office of Rediff.com and so Sunny and me decided to go to Rediff, while Ashish and Mehuel ( a Mumbai member) would go to Kinetic to drop the bike. It was indeed a great honor for us to do a presentation at the Rediff office and it was a pleasure to interact with the great minds behind one of the biggest and best online portals in India. A good section of the people working there seemed to be interested a lot in what a bunch of guys were trying to achieve by riding on not so ordinary machines across India. Yeah, we are actually just a bunch of really ordinary guys, who don’t want to live the normal life of wasting our time while we are here at earth. We may seem to be fools to most of the people we come across, or most of the people who read about us in newspapers but when we genuinely come across those understand what we are doing, or try to understand what our aim is, that is when the real satisfaction comes and that is when we know that yes, somewhere done the line, we might just make a slight difference in the way we Indians look at our country, in the way people look at bikers and bikes.
After Rediff, it was time to head to Bandra Reclamation road section – a perfect place to go to if you want to open up your machine. But no, we Indians will make sure that the only decent road section in Mumbai which has the potential of being good to ride and drive on, should be reduced to half its width with bikes and more bikes and cars lined up all the way till the end. And yes, couple don’t give a damm about who you are or what you are doing – they just seem to make the most of the place, in every sense, and for us Delhites, it did seem odd in the beginning but once others members came and discussed about it, we did seem to understand that in reality, the Bandra Reclamation is one of the very few places which give couples a chance to be free and enjoy some good time together. Yes, you will definitely see bikers ripping their machines and some real good cars zooming past, and with the Arabian Sea on one side and the city on the other, at night, the place does come into its own. And for once, I enjoyed the weather in Mumbai.
I had plans to meet up with pals, but in the other end of the town, that too in rush hour traffic, but riding back was nice, with me coming across a ZX-10R and a Ferrari 648! Welcome to Mumbai….