Trip to Nandi Hills

After a long vacation-less November, it was time for action again, and this time we decided to go visit Coorg near Bangalore during the weekend of Dec 6-7. However since the number of people got reduced to my friend - MJ, his wife - Sudha and myself, We had no option but to cancel the planned 2 day coorg trip and then instead planned on visiting Nandi Hills about 70 km from bangalore.

Since we felt a cab for 3 people was an overkill, we took my friend AJ's Pulsar 180, and Phani's Bajaj Discover to visit Nandi hills. We started at 1PM in the afternoon after having lunch at Swagruha near our friend's house. After travelling for 4 km on the Outer Ring Road, I was stopped by two cops. The Pulsar 180 is a Tamil Nadu registration vehicle, and my friend never actually paid the Karnataka state tax for it. So not having any kind of insurance/pollution certificate or tax reciept, he asked for a Rs 800 fine... or Rs 200 bribe :)). I paid the bribe and he warned me about more cops checking vehicles near the Hebbal flyover. I took heed to his warning and closely followed a lorry, and missed the bunch of cops who were stopping vehicles at the Hebbal Flyover.

Nandi hills is located about 40 km away from the newly constructed Bangalore International Airport (BIAL), and hence the road was a 6 lane one with a 80KMPH speed limit. The P180 was rearing to go and I cruised along, but not forgetting to check out for cops at the same time. We reached Nandi hills at 3:30 PM.

The place was extremely beautiful, although there were no clouds. We had a complete view of the place around. Nandi hills was actually a fort belonging to Tipu Sultan at one time. The rock formation was awesome, and we had a walk all around the place and took a ton of pics. We also took our trademark "in-the-air" pics, where we jump, and use a multi snap capture camera to take a series of photographs spaced about 300 ms from each other. The monkeys on the hill were a serious menace, with one trying to snatch a chips packet directly from my hand. and it would not scare at all.

We started back at 5:30PM from Nandi Hills, and it was almost 8:00 PM by the time I reached my friend's house, without any further brushes with the cops :)