Was standing yesterday at a zebra crossing with three cute calves close by. Crossed over to the median in the middle of the road once the traffic thinned on my side and was waiting there to get to the other as the traffic was persistent. I was suddenly nudged at my back and I turned back startled to see that it was one of the calves. All the three were lined up behind me (though there was enough space beside), also doing the road crossing maneuver. One of the calves mooed and it sounded to me as if it was asking me to 'move'. Hopped aside and they crossed the road without a fuss (blocking the oncoming traffic, ha!), with me piggybacking along to the other side.
Couldn't help a chuckle with a disbelieving shake of the head. :-D Street smart, they are, I've to acknowledge!
Showing posts with label Roads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roads. Show all posts
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Travelogue - The Switchback Mountain
Now that my vacation plans are toast, I thought I'll pull a travelogue that has been sitting as a draft for a significantly long time (almost 6 months), and publish.
Blessed are the people with a home in the mountains or close to it. It is an experience to be on the hills or close to one. The air, the silence, the sounds, the vistas, the clouds, the mist!!! I could go on and on.
How many times while going on journeys, you come across a fork in the road or a board with directions to a place of which you have little or no idea of, but somehow urges you to visit it? Our visit to Kolli Hills (Kolli Malai in Tamizh) in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu was one such. Used to see markers to it on the Salem-Namakkal highway near Rasipuram on my drives to Thanjavur, and before one such trip, decided to take the fork to Kolli Hills and then continue the journey. This was a rare 'whole family' occasion with my parents and siblings/family joining the trip.
Trolled about the place on the Web and one of the high points of the place was the approach to the top. I am not sure, but the road from the foothills to the top of the mountain must figure at least in the Limca book of records.
Bengaluru (mind it, from the outskirts) to Salem, starting in the morning, was an effortless cruise due to the NHAI paving an international grade road for the entire stretch. Detoured into Salem, packed lunch at Adyar Ananda Bhavan (A2B) at Salem and started towards Namakkal. The drive till the Rasipuram diversion was good (the national highway NH7 is being 4 laned all the way to Kanyakumari as a part of the North-South corridor) and then an abrupt slow-down to a crawl as we entered Rasipuram. After enquiries and around half an hour of further driving, we were at the foothills of the mountain range.
Kolli Hills is a part of the Eastern Ghats and is around 1300 metres above mean sea level (MSL). The climb up is heady. 70 hair-pin bends (or switchback turns) till you reach the first village on the top (approx. 20 kms) and from there to other places (villages) around on the hills, there are further more hair-pin bends to negotiate. Either you can enjoy those 180° turns or sit tight with your head reeling and stomach churning (and inhaling a citrus fruit or eat sour candy).
The beauty with any mountain/hill road is that as you slowly go up the gradient, the forest cover increases and by the time you realize it, there is a valley on one side and you have climbed the hills and a carpet of green soothes you. The hair-pin bends here were not difficult to negotiate with the sparse traffic, having negotiated the steep ghats from Bandipur to Ooty via Masinagudi (36 high gradient hair-pin bends, boy! what a route it is) a few weeks prior to that. It took around an hour to get to the top of the hills from the base, and the journey was worth it.
Stopped near a wayside temple with a mountain stream beside it, with a nice flow of water. The water was cold to the touch and refreshing. After standing relaxed in the flowing water for a few minutes in rapt silence with nothing but the sounds of the gurgling water on the rocks and the mini waterfall, unpacked the A2B lunch and gobbled it up, sharing it with two doggies that were roaming around. Surprisingly no monkeys at that point. Especially when you are really hungry, food tastes like 'devaamritha' and A2B's curd rice slips through your tongue to the stomach.
There was a vista point at the summit from a government guest house where the valley down below and the plains beyond can be seen. The wind was very strong at this point pushing everything around. There were a few other vista points as well, but we decided to go to a few places and then head down before darkness falls.
This place is famous for its Paari link to Tamil Sangam literature. The anecdote is that king Paari, who on seeing a jasmine (mullai) climber on the roadside without support to climb upon, left his chariot for the creeper to use as a prop. (Mullaikku thaer koduththaan Paari) Nothing much exists of a palace or its associated trappings. There is an ancient Shiva temple (Arappaleeswarar) and a gorgeous waterfall (Aakaasa Gangai) for which you have to go down a 1000 steps. We didn't do it as the skies were darkening, tiredness was setting in, and we had to go another 160+ kms from base of the hills to reach Thanjavur and driving in the dark is treacherous because of the curvy roads till Tiruchi and demonic drivers with their headlights blazing on hi-beam. On the way down, picked up some hill produce (pineapples, oranges etc) and the oranges proved useful to overcome nausea while negotiating those 70 bends down.
The roads were lovely, especially for a road less travelled. The hills are still unspoilt and hopefully remains that way. There is an annual festival on Paari that happens which seems to get crowds there. But it is relatively peaceful and hidden, otherwise. For those who have heard of this place somewhere on TV, yes!, it was featured in a diversionary story in the Tamizh soap of a life-time, the one and only "Kolangal" (gee, I forgot the serial's name suddenly and had to look it up and whoa, I miss that stupid serial in hindsight :-))
Blessed are the people with a home in the mountains or close to it. It is an experience to be on the hills or close to one. The air, the silence, the sounds, the vistas, the clouds, the mist!!! I could go on and on.
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| The hills in the distance beckon |
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| Lonely road to the hills |
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| National Highway 7, as smooth as it gets |
Kolli Hills is a part of the Eastern Ghats and is around 1300 metres above mean sea level (MSL). The climb up is heady. 70 hair-pin bends (or switchback turns) till you reach the first village on the top (approx. 20 kms) and from there to other places (villages) around on the hills, there are further more hair-pin bends to negotiate. Either you can enjoy those 180° turns or sit tight with your head reeling and stomach churning (and inhaling a citrus fruit or eat sour candy).
You can see the road starting at the top left corner and snaking its way to the center
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| Negotiating a curvy hair-pin bend |
 |
| Green carpet |
 |
| Approaching the summit |
 |
| The vista view |
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| Arappaleeswarar Temple |
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| Some places of interest around |
The roads were lovely, especially for a road less travelled. The hills are still unspoilt and hopefully remains that way. There is an annual festival on Paari that happens which seems to get crowds there. But it is relatively peaceful and hidden, otherwise. For those who have heard of this place somewhere on TV, yes!, it was featured in a diversionary story in the Tamizh soap of a life-time, the one and only "Kolangal" (gee, I forgot the serial's name suddenly and had to look it up and whoa, I miss that stupid serial in hindsight :-))
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Musings - Road Sense
A reference to a Readers Digest article translated into Tamil in http://idlyvadai.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post_07.html got me moving on this post to rant.
All the strain of driving in Bengaluru's increasingly chaotic roads is getting on my nerves.
Do people applying for a Learners Licence in India know the "Rules of the road" clearly? Or for that matter, do the "Bhadralok" who drive the motorized genies on the roads (and that includes me as well)?
By Rules of the road, I mean
If this is all the people need to know before getting a licence, no wonder our road sense is as bad as what it is!!!
Where will people get the idea of what the rules of the road are? A good place to start road discipline is in schools. Let us have a subject that covers this and make it engaging and not drab.
At least can't we (the RTO) come up with a "Rules of the Road" booklet as in the US and charge for it (Even 50/100 bucks is okay for that) But it should give a clear idea of what is expected of you as a driver (2 wheeler, 4 wheeler, commercial driver etc).
Keep the entrance test difficult. Test the driver properly. Let the traffic police enforce the rules strictly and maybe let them start with standardizing the road signs. I see sub-text written inside a "No stopping/parking" sign. How the hell can a driver see what is that? And allowing non-standard sized signs even though there are rules in the Indian Road Congress bible (only that it may have references to archaic rules dating from the British times).
Use common sense rules. The traffic police put a 20 kmph speed limit sign on a stretch of a National Highway, of all things, in a village near my house and caught vehicles exceeding that limit with a speed gun. Have those folks driven at 20 kmph to feel what it is, and that too on a clear stretch of a highway? Even a cycle can go faster. Now, I notice that the sign is missing.)
Look at the following booklet of what the road rules are in California, for example. It is so damn detailed and expects you to know the same clearly to pass the written test there. The driving test is even more difficult there. You make one small miss and there goes your chance for a license. You've to retry after a fortnight or so.
http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/driver_handbook_toc.htm
India needs a different type of this book given the wild types of traffic, but it is not an impossible task.
When will we ever reach that maturity? When will we ever attain moksha in road-sense and not moksha by being run over or bumped by wayward drivers? If we start the due-diligence and implementation now, maybe 10 years from now, we may see some real improvement. Else, we churn forever in chaos. Until then, let us drive sane and safe.
I sincerely feel we have had too much of freedom and it is being abused to the hilt. No easy solutions, but that is huge rant for some other day. :-(
Mmm...
All the strain of driving in Bengaluru's increasingly chaotic roads is getting on my nerves.
Do people applying for a Learners Licence in India know the "Rules of the road" clearly? Or for that matter, do the "Bhadralok" who drive the motorized genies on the roads (and that includes me as well)?
By Rules of the road, I mean
- Traffic Signals and their meaning
- Common and not-so common road signs
- Lane Discipline-Line colors, meaning
- Hand signals and Turn signals - When and how of using?
- Safe driving - Usage of seat belts, Speed Limits, When to honk or not, hill driving
- Drunken driving and penalties
- Parking rules
- Respecting emergency vehicles (ambulances, police vehicles)
- Respecting school vehicles/buses
- Zebra/Pedestrian crossings
- Your rights as a vehicle owner
Where will people get the idea of what the rules of the road are? A good place to start road discipline is in schools. Let us have a subject that covers this and make it engaging and not drab.
At least can't we (the RTO) come up with a "Rules of the Road" booklet as in the US and charge for it (Even 50/100 bucks is okay for that) But it should give a clear idea of what is expected of you as a driver (2 wheeler, 4 wheeler, commercial driver etc).
Keep the entrance test difficult. Test the driver properly. Let the traffic police enforce the rules strictly and maybe let them start with standardizing the road signs. I see sub-text written inside a "No stopping/parking" sign. How the hell can a driver see what is that? And allowing non-standard sized signs even though there are rules in the Indian Road Congress bible (only that it may have references to archaic rules dating from the British times).
Use common sense rules. The traffic police put a 20 kmph speed limit sign on a stretch of a National Highway, of all things, in a village near my house and caught vehicles exceeding that limit with a speed gun. Have those folks driven at 20 kmph to feel what it is, and that too on a clear stretch of a highway? Even a cycle can go faster. Now, I notice that the sign is missing.)
Look at the following booklet of what the road rules are in California, for example. It is so damn detailed and expects you to know the same clearly to pass the written test there. The driving test is even more difficult there. You make one small miss and there goes your chance for a license. You've to retry after a fortnight or so.
http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/driver_handbook_toc.htm
India needs a different type of this book given the wild types of traffic, but it is not an impossible task.
When will we ever reach that maturity? When will we ever attain moksha in road-sense and not moksha by being run over or bumped by wayward drivers? If we start the due-diligence and implementation now, maybe 10 years from now, we may see some real improvement. Else, we churn forever in chaos. Until then, let us drive sane and safe.
I sincerely feel we have had too much of freedom and it is being abused to the hilt. No easy solutions, but that is huge rant for some other day. :-(
Mmm...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Musings - Digging roads
Why do our civic authorities dig and repeatedly dig the roads and footpaths that have been laid?
Is it not common sense to build a duct (or a set of ducts each at multiple levels) on each side of the road which holds all the necessary infrastructure like water lines, sewerage lines, electricity cables, fiber optic cables, phone cables, cable TV cables with regular cross-over conduits to the other side of the road and have management points / huts separately for each?
This would be cost effective in the long run and any problems can be quickly identified and fixed.
Chennai's Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) seems to have something like this and this could be applied to all major roads at least and make it a discipline for new layouts.
Mmm...
Is it not common sense to build a duct (or a set of ducts each at multiple levels) on each side of the road which holds all the necessary infrastructure like water lines, sewerage lines, electricity cables, fiber optic cables, phone cables, cable TV cables with regular cross-over conduits to the other side of the road and have management points / huts separately for each?
This would be cost effective in the long run and any problems can be quickly identified and fixed.
Chennai's Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) seems to have something like this and this could be applied to all major roads at least and make it a discipline for new layouts.
Mmm...
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