Chennai Jeepers Independence day OTR @ Nagalapuram

[trammway]

Some of you might have noticed that my TBHP Avatar picture has been changed from yesterday night. Yes, that cow-boy getup is mine that was clicked during yesterday’s grand OTR.

Early morning breeze in Chennai city yesterday had the sweet fragrance of soil, as a result of drizzling. When I packed all my recovery gear and loaded on my jeep, the city was still asleep.

I knew the day is going to be one of unforgettable offroad day, the GoogleEarth provided excellent overview of the place called Nagalapuram, the night before our OTR. I must thank Chennai Trekkers Club guys who lit the light on this area. Awesome place it is and is similar to Kelambakkam, Thiruporur like terrain that is near to Chennai. I’m sure unlimited fun awaits here.

With all the dreams of forthcoming offroad fun, I turned the ignition key on, My explorer was quite fast in waking up. Engine was kept on idle run for 1-2 min so that the oil lubricate all the components inside the power plant. By that time my mobile was ringing and, I saw the newly installed rearview mirror’s colorful leads flashing around the mirror. The mirror was given to me by Shibu and the mirror identifies if your mobile ringing and flash the LED lights to alert you that the mobile is ringing. He he he some jeep savvy person understood that the jeep’s sound will overcome any tiny electronic gadget sound and came up with this brilliant idea. Anyway after seeing the lights I pressed the receiver button on, heard Samy my HCL colleague saying he has already reached the meeting point and waiting for me, oh boy you are so quick, I told him.

I pushed the accelerator pedal a bit and saw the speed clocking 85+kmph, that is enough for 10mins travel to reach the meeting point.However I needed to pickup Sharon on the way. I made a call to the group waiting for me to move slowly so I can join them in north of Chennai.

Thirty minutes later, Sharon and I parked the Jeep near Thirumangalam where the group was waiting for us. A few more chaps were expected to join and while waiting we had hot and strong Chennai’s special filter coffee .The rain god was showing his face now and then, it felt really great to hold the hot coffee cup when the environment around was so chill at 5:30am early morning.

After the other members came, we started off towards Nagalapuram. About an hour drive, I keep seeing the wiper cleaning the windshield. Mind was full of expectation and excitements. The girl next to me is full of talk about her Ooty off-road chaps and cousins who do offroad in Bangalore. The travel time passed with no worries, most of the roads were free and when we hit highway only few trucks which we over took. In between we also stopped at a place for our breakfast, all my friends were thoroughly enjoying the trip. After all we go to offroad once in a month and the trips are the only chances we get to meet each other. We had two French nationals as guests offroaders driving a Gypsy with us. It was great fun while Sharon was talking like kid’s nursery class to them on French and Satish and Padhu making fun over the talk.

After our break fast and few minutes of drive we were already getting lost at directions on unknown rustic villages of Andra, the location we were heading was in the border between Andra and Tamilnadu.

The villages were beautiful, sound of water evident in all the way till our final destination. Hmmm recent rain is good to all urban and rural people. We often waved hands to the school children enroute who wore the tricolor flags on their dress. Most of the school had the national flags hosted as part of Independence day celebration. No one took their eyes out from our vehicles the colorful but very smart offroaders passed the hamlets. We also thoroughly enjoyed the old temples, huts, bullock carts and what not everything that we crossed. With couple of queries to the locals and loss of direction finally we had our heroic off roaders touched the terrain of the talk.

to be continued...

[joshguy]

Wow that would have been a great day man.

If am right this nagalapuram is on the way to tirupathy right ? is a wonderfull place and i ve been there too.

You should have checked out the kone falls then

[Sankar]

Upload photos please

[trammway]

Originally Posted by joshguy

Wow that would have been a great day man.

If am right this nagalapuram is on the way to tirupathy right ? is a wonderfull place and i ve been there too.

You should have checked out the kone falls then

Yes, It was great day out.

Nagalapuram is branching out from Utthukottai, and kone falls is on the back side of Nagalapuram. But these hill ranges are continuation of Thirupati ones.

Originally Posted by Sankar

Upload photos please

Pictures & Videos are coming... on the way.

[trammway]

to be continued...

[dhrishikesh]

@ Siva,
Thanks for the pics.
BTW how is your jeep behaving with a new 2.5L engine ?? feeling any changes or something ??

[V-16]

Great start to the thread Pardner!! Lets have some more details and some pics now!

[trammway]

Before I move forward to share the terrain information I must share some pictures that we clicked during our trip towards Nagalapuram. The route that takes you to Nagalapuram is stuffed with beauty, the green shades are sure steal your heart, mountain valley and few dry lakes, tarmac roads but looked deserted and the villages are completely amazing and we really happy that on an Independence day we got an opportunity to visit the remote villages of India.

Though the en route was very interesting, I had a scary feeling what if we really don’t get to see a best location out in Nagalapuram for offroading. Since the explorer was given catalyst job to guide the team following us we had to stop at few locations to inquire the destination. I must hint the truth here, we visited this place first time and no one got a clear picture about offroadable points. What we had is guts to do RECCE and offroad together and find the best possible location and adhoc plan.

My eyes were looking all possible angles to identify an offroad spot or stream, we slowly pushed the vehicles off the tarmac and entered into what is so called village path or mud road. The offroaders were crossed few water streams, I know some of the people were creating doubt if the location going to be a good one for the day. The zest and enthusiasm of finding location to accommodate such a huge bunch of offroaders is a tough but very thrilling job.

At one point the electric like sparkle and lighting happiness struck many of us, the misty mountains and hard rocks under the shoes what else an offroader needs. In fact that was the spot the road we followed dead ended. I heard someone saying “Lucky Day”, with no time the cute little monsters tried finding their own path. The hardworking people from various industries knew this is the way to get away from the hum drum of life, to do something that the passion in our blood tells us to do.

People were so excited the clouds passing by the mountains, and bushes covered paths a navigating puppy which was running along us for the entire day.

At some times to find our path we were forced to stop on the bushes where the vehicles have to stop on convoy and each vehicle got bound by the plant thorn so no way of getting out.

The two wheeler guy who came with us went first inside the forest looking for further route and returned with a message that route we followed got no ends. Captain Gopi decided to push the gypsy into a path that was not existed, and with in a minute or two he discovered a coming up water reservoir project. All the jeeps crawled on the rocks and clay to reach the wonderful and scenic location.

To be continued …

[trammway]

Mods, Please remove the pictures from the above post and clear the references for the pics from my post content. They got some issue and stuck. I'm uploading the pictures for the previous post in here below:

[petrol_head]

Hey Shiva.. nice pics there.. Guess you guys had a great time at Nagalapuram. Hope the terrain was enticing enough. Hope to see more snaps from you.

Originally Posted by trammway

I'm sorry I didn't get you, what is that faction#3 and other one ? nitrous you mean to say there was 2 or 3 events(groups) in chennai among passionate jeepers? Leave any commercial events, let me see what is the answer I'm listening ...

The story will continue tomorrow hope to see you all again on this page

Originally Posted by trammway

I hope you wouldn't have even heard any advertisement or call notices for the event because it is an event orignized to a closed circle of friends. This is purely done by passionate 4x4 friends with no tags, you know what I mean.

I bet you are not trying to say that TPC is an off road event with commercial interests? or are you?

well for starters this is what the website says This event is being organised on a no-profit, no-loss basis. link - TPC 2009

Secondly I guess every participant would vouch for that. I was expecting you to be there. Only learnt 3 days before the event that you would not make it. Did not know it was because of the 3 day span of the event.. or was it?

[trammway]

Originally Posted by esteem_lover

trammway pal, is that too much to ask for ?
ANy event, even the 'Let's go' kind of events need some planning & safety should be the utmost priority when it comes to any sport/adventure. And I hope you do remember what happened in the previous events while people got merry & landed in deep waters.

Of course yes. I completely agree with you. Security and Safety are the utmost thing comes into my mind. We all have Recovery gears on the vehicle, you know that those items are part of our plans about "If only" some thing goes wrong type preparation.

We all discuss the recovery and health issues related to OTR only to aware of the issue around the sports.

Awareness creates the most important aspects of an OTR on safety ground, once you learn a lesson those are corrected.

If you are thinking only writing rules will get you away from accidents (please tell me if everyone at various OTRs strictly follow rules???) I'm sure some issue in understanding. The rules needs to be followed, one time experience due to error is acceptable but those are not repeating type and lesson learnt, let's move on to the next step.

I know how many guys drunk and driven even in the organized events and what kind of accidents happened in those events. Human error is always there, but how we correct issues happening again is the only subject.

I'm going forward with my Nagalapuram trip summary... join me guys!

[trammway]

The rocks that took us near to reservoir project invited me to do a balancing act, look at the picture below each wheel to be parked on rocks (photo angle is not so good but still it was fun). The fun loving crowd’s convoy reached the lush and green forest and started exploring the possible opportunities to get the rubber do its best.

Oh boy the large and small sized hard rocks all over created a big time fun, I must say the foreigners were amazed and surprised to see these kind of sports activities are happening in India. They have also acted along with us in few recoveries where the vehicles got stuck badly.

When we got queued up for obstacle crossing, myself and two my other friends got into to different path and started exploring the beautiful and most enjoyable offroad ground.




You know what the entire trip was a fun offroad trip. Every one no matter what age, gender and what brand of offroad capable vehicles participated we had fun stuffed with the trip.

The entire terrain was filled with stones, stones and stones. In general the diesel vehicles got the best ability to crawl on the rocks and stones. But all the dieselized vehicles got the tough time when we approached a giant 55-70ft incline which looked around 60-65degree angle. The photos here may not justify the angle but one must try out to believe in the kind of challenge put in front of us.




As I was crawling at another location, I really missed the opportunity to see the first vehicle or few vehicles that successfully completed the obstacle.



When I reached the massive wall, was looking at a CJ3B failing with B275 motor. The reasons I got is that not enough space for run on time and wrong gearing ratio. I told him ok, let me try now… I put on the transfer case to 4WD Low and moved the vehicles from 1st to 2nd gear and attempted to climb up the wall oh boy I could only do half of the wall. I wondered why may be it is the run on distance??? ok let me push myself little behind and run fast to climp. The massive incline is some thing that got a steep incline for 10ft from the initial ground and there was a flat surface of 1 or 2 ft before we touch the continues rest of the incline.

Hence every time after crossing the 10ft I got the engine power draining out and need to reverse off. Since I was stalled every time at the middle of the steep incline reversing the vehicle with clutch and break would have turned deadly but the proper way of doing reversing in this kind of situation is to put the transfer case gear into Low and Reverse and let the engine run and take full control of your steering and don’t even think of pressing break of clutch. Since the reverse gear on 4WD low gives the lowest possible speed you can safely ground in such situation.

Alright now it is turn for another gypsy to conquer the incline, please remember the run on space before the obstacle was really less and gypsy like petrol got the momentum really quick and started climbing up with spinning wheels ohhhhoooohhhhh there was another lesson to be learned. When obstacle like hard mud climb exercise one need to remember not to rev-up the engine and loosing fraction under the tyre. That is what happen to the gypsy since the over speed tyres started spinning the vehicle was running zig-zak and got stuck on the water ways created on the incline by rain water. Now reversing this gypsy is impossible as the gypsy ran zig-zak and out of the actual track, so we few guys went up helped to give a push from back when Captain Gopi skillfully helped the gypsy make up to the top.

Now it is the CJ3B’s last chance, let see how is he going to do so I can follow the same. By that time two of my friends who were driving MM540 came near to the obstacle that we were trying to cross. The MM 540s were also failing, must be a big deal now…

Ok, now this is the trick how to handle such situation with your dieselized heavy vehicles on climbs like this one.

to be continued….

[rohanarthur]

Great outing, people! Looks like you had great fun. As an aside, weren't there any water bodies that could have been tackled?

[trammway]

Originally Posted by rohanarthur

Great outing, people! Looks like you had great fun. As an aside, weren't there any water bodies that could have been tackled?

Thats right. Please wait for next episode of pictures and summary.

[trammway]

more pictures