Kannur-Hassan

Saturday, November 19
I didn’t even turn on my alarm this morning. I figured everyone is going to be slow in waking up and rolling. By 8 am we went to have breakfast which lasted a while. Today our distance to cover was another 300 kms and we were going to stop for the night in Hassan, which is only 180 km away from Bangalore. We opted not to ride all the way to Bangalore in the dark and reach there quite late in the night. So arrangements were made for us to saty the night in Hassan and roll early the next day to Bangalore.
After our thank you and farewells to our friends in Kannur, we headed towards Mangalore which was about 150 kms north of Kannur. The road conditions were very similar to those of the previous couple of days. We stopped often to film and to take breaks. Soon we crossed in to the Karnataka state border and not far after that we got to Mangalore around 1:30pm. (see photo)At that point we had unofficially completed our circum-navigation of the country. On September 25 when we started out from Bangalore, we set out west to mangalore and from this point we headed north along the coast. Now we completed the parikrama by reaching that circle from the south. It was a very thrilling moment for all of us and we stopped to congratulate each other and take some pictures.
Some local reporter saw us and enquired about our journey and soon got his cameraman to come and did a impromtu interview for the local television.
The sun was very intense here. Staying in that open area with no shade was making me feel quite tired and uncomfortable. Soon we retraced our path from there going East towards Hassan which was another 150 kms away.
We were concerned about the condition of the roads in the western ghat section. It was already beat up in many areas 2 months prior. Since then there were severe rain storms and we were expecting a lot worse. Fortunately the roads were no worse than before and after what we had been through in other parts of the country, it didn’t phase us much. We saw the final sunset over the western ghats as we got to Sakhileshpur. As we were gaining altitude to 3000feet, the air was much cooler and was quite nippy.
We reached Hassan around 7pm, and were greeted with garlands at the hotel by another biker buddy of Dinesh, whose name was also Dinesh. He had come there on his KTM 950 motorcycle. It was quite a big bike and made our kawasaki bikes look like toys.
I wasn’t feeling so good in my stomach. Didn’t know if it was indigestion or tiredness or just an anti climatic feeling of having completed the circum-navigation. Either way, i opted to skip the drinks and dinner and settled for some fruit salad with ice cream and got to bed by 10:30 pm.
Navroze was very keen on starting off by no later than 6:30 am the next day and all of us felt we could do it as well.

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