5th Nov : Kumarakom - Kovalam

Relaxing on the Kovalam Beach...

5th Nov : Kumarakom - Kovalam

How do you live your whole life in just a second? Ride a moto-scooter, with no rear brakes, cruise at 100km/h and take that longish curve without slowing down as you are listening to your favourite song on the Ipod, just to be shocked to death when you see a speeding Kerala state transport bus hurling down, in your lane, towards you!

The day today didn’t start in a good way for me. First my machine, the Blaze, was leaking oil as if it wanted to mark its territory where ever it stopped, that too in a big way! Then, as we left our resort, within minutes, Sunil rode upto me and told me that the whole rear swingarm was shaking as if was drunk! I stopped to check and Vinayak Jee informed me that the bushes of the swingarm had totally worn out because of the constant leakage of oil, which always had the bushes soiled in it! Anyways we proceeded on and I could easily feel the rear dancing away as we rode through even the minutest of imperfections on the road. Kiran was waiting for us along with the media guy from Malayalam Manorama. We had a small photoshoot and carried on for Allepy from where we would take the NH47 down to Kovallam beach. Fate wasn’t on my side and within some kilometers, the rear tyre of the Blaze got punctured. If this wasn’t enough, after taking out the Jupiter from the pick-up truck, the pick-up left and as I started riding the Jupiter, I realized the front fender was broken! Finally after somehow fixing it with tapes, we carried on!

The Jupiter was my ride for today after the Blaze had a puncture...The difference in the machines is apparent immediately. She feels really big, powerful and heavier. The Blaze is a joy through traffic and on twisties!

The road to Allepy was quite good, with water bodies on both the sides but then such things are short lived and soon we were riding on broken roads, which I think were due to flooding as in rains the possibility of this road getting submerged under water seemed to be quite high. The Jupiter didn’t feel comfortable at all on such roads, and the CBR had a tough (and slow) time negotiating such stretches.

Kiran rode with us till Allepy, from where he turned back and we continued the ride ahead. We stopped for lunch at a Kerala tourism restaurant. It’s been ages since I had such delicious and value for money food. They only had a Keralite buffet and at just Rs 43 per person (in A/C hall), it seemed totally worth it. I didn’t even know what I was having, but it surely tasted quite good and wholesome too.

Outside the Kerala Tourism restaurant

It was after this that the above mentioned incident happened and after that, I didn’t cross 80km/h at all! Sunny and Sunil stopped somewhere to fill the CBR and so Ashish and I carried onto Kovalam, straight to the Hawa Beach to look around for hotels. The road which goes to Kovalam from the highway is totally different to one we were riding on. Wide, smooth and with low traffic, it’s a total different experience of riding on this road. Hotels right next to the beach seemed outta out budget so we searched around quite a bit but finally got a call from Sunny that they were waiting for us. Joined them and went to this big hotel overlooking the beach, the Beach Castle. It did look expensive but the rooms and the big balcony made up for it and at 1750 per room per night, it seemed well worth it!

View from the balcony...

We didn’t loose any time and went straight away to the beach to click the sun rising down on the Arabian Sea. There were quite some people on the beach, and the waves seemed quite strong here. As soon as the sun went down, the waves picked up the momentum further and the coast guards started requesting people to walk off!

We too left the beach and started searching for some good restaurant amongst dozens of them, all located facing the beach! Dinner was a Pizza affair and we were back to the comfort of our rooms and I straight away went for the bath-tub, relaxing and scrubbing myself of all the dirt and smoke that had accumulated today!

One thing that I noticed today was that Kovalam has a lot of foreigners coming in and most of the restaurants on the beach had foreigners in it. Not that the restaurants only allow them, but the percentage of these people here took me by surprise! And every restaurant had big fancy dead fishes on the entrance, laid out properly, to showcase to customers and some even had live lobsters! For us, the smell of fish seemed too much, coming from the fishes as well the air at that place and hence the reason for going in for Pizza for dinner.

Tomorrow we relax and do some sightseeing here. Looking forward to meeting the Trivandrum Xbhp guys…