This is Part Two. All images are shot by tifosikrishna.
The second circuit was different, there were hardly any rocks or crevices. But it involved climbing and getting off two massive inclines that were anything but smooth. One of the inclines had 10-15ft deep gorges on both sides. Miss your tyre footing, the Jeep would topple. We had to do this circuit from clockwise and anti-clockwise direction to fully master it.
This was bottle on the Classic.
This is Srinath on his LC prado.
As Srinath climbed with his LC, he made a mistake of stopping a wee little early. As a result he lost momentum and couldn’t get his rear tyres across. In fact the LC became sitting duck on a small mound, no amount of pushing, revving or prodding helped.
King of the hill.
Pushing it back didn’t work.
But there was no reason to panic, in fact Srinath kept a cool head trusting Arka to save the day, and he did.
Srinath keeping a cool head.
The winch cable is being set.
Now it is ready.
The winch motor starts and the LC has left the hill.
Although we lost about 30 minutes in this rescue operation, it was an unexpected by important lesson demonstrating the importance of a winch in off-roading.
When I started on this circuit, I had Lateef as the co-pilot. Once he discovered I couldn’t understand Tamil, he resorted to one word commands like left and right. Since there was gorge on both sides, it was important to get it exactly right. But with all the experts around me I was pretty confident and did this circuit perfectly.
This is me climbing.
This is me descending.
Since we lost time, not everybody could try this circuit, we soon left for the most challenging part of the trip. Here we had to climb down almost half KM long rocky twisting road. Since it was too steep and rocky, there was no question of a photographer walking down the path. And the Jeeps were bouncing so hard on rocks, I am not sure how many pulled out their camera. Except the following tame part of the road, I don’t have any photo of the most difficult part of the trail. If anybody took a photo here, please post it.
The tamer part of the path. It is steeper than it looks here, should have shot this sitting down.
This was the most challenging trail of the day, it was surely not like crossing one ditch, it was just continuous rock hopping with 3 people in the back. Thankfully Arka was again sitting next to me and was giving non-stop commentary and advice. Never touch brake, don’t over-revv, turn into the tilt, swallow the ditch, in fact don’t touch anything. Actually I kept my foot off all the foot pedals, no clutch, no brake, no accelerator. The Jeep kept going down in 1st gear 4L mode just using gravity. The input I provided was steering, considering it was no power steering, and on rocks, it kept me really busy. Few times I did get stuck and got the ignition switch off. This is where I was taught how to recover from a stuck situation. Leave the jeep in gear, leave the clutch alone, crank the engine and press acceleration. I had to do this few times in both 1st and reverse gear depending on my stuck situation.
Our destination was to reach the bottom of this quarry and find water.
As we almost reached the bottom of the quarry, we now had one last challenge to cross. By this time Arka was confident enough to let me try it first without any co-pilot, I was the lead Jeep at this time. I walked the path along with him and he showed the best path to take it.
Here is the challenge, I need to climb this down.
Heh, heh, piece of cake.
Destination reached.
This is the end of part two.