S&M - Chapter 1

If Chapter zero was a statement made, Chapter one is a preamble to the genesis of the statement.

Two days before the trip, I was skeptical about making it. People who had committed to come to the trip had now declared in an equivocal style: "I am not sure I can make it". Ofcourse, you don't have the time or wait, something new came up all of a sudden and you were caught up attending to that job. Ofcourse...

Thus, the original five guys had gradually collapsed to the current three of us who were presently committal to make the trip and understandably, I had lost faith in the freakiness of the trip. I decided to pack the trip, but my friend, who had sound 'mallu' connections, mentioned that he had got the rooms in the resort at Nelliyampathy booked and travel arrangements had also been made..'Now you can't back out, I have put so much fight da', he pleaded.
The good-natured guy that I am, I couldn't ditch the trip now, so I resigned to my fate, but then I thought I could do a last hitch attempt at getting more guys to come to the trip..Well...I convinced two guys the day before the trip telling them that it was going to be the 'trip of their life', 'some exotic adventure in the God's own country'.

The next day brought in more trouble as these guys(the two so called convinced ones) weren't ready to make the journey as they were scared of making the onward journey by bus, and that we(the three of us) would have a comfortable one travelling by train. I saw only one way out here: I asked one of them to take my seat and berth in the train and I along with the other guy would make the what happened to be a roller-coaster ride in the bus.
Well, now we were five in number. The sixth guy seeing the situation to be a favourable one( gumbal formation), said that 'He was going to make the trip after all'. Nice..
I wondered if we were one too many now. Anyway, that was the pre-trip hullaballoo that took a lot of my time as I had assumed the role of the the unofficial coordinating guy for the trip.

If the train journey, that three of the group made to palakkad is assumed to be a non-undulating, more or less smooth comfortable path from start to finish, the bus-journey we undertook could be best described as a sinusoidal curve that had its gigantic ups and colossal downs. The state of sleeplessness we realised could be fun and also a pain beyond a point.

We experienced a slice of life, so to speak as we went from the highs: the awesome fart session(topics including our good old philosophy, a whole new perspective on the meaning of the word perspective, on when people are actually busy and when they fake to be so, etc) of a duration of more than six hours( a pr for me), the clear star-studded sky viewed when we got down from the bus at a railway crossing in the bus journey from Chennai - Salem; to the lows: rickety bus and bumpty bump roads (Salem- Coimbatore) plus the inability to satisfy our basic needs as we made the final lap(Coimbatore to palakkad) of the seemingly never-ending trip. The lack of sleep also took a toll on us as we left from palakkad towards the eagerly-awaited Nelliyampathy a.k.a 'Poor Mans Ooty', around 2.5 hrs drive from palakkad, later on in the day.

While the train journey had taken only 9 hrs, the poor unssuspecting 'us' had assumed it would take 10 hrs by bus for the same distance. We were grossly mistaken, as it took a long 13 hrs to reach the destination. , more so because we had taken three buses to make the onward journey, a distance not more than 500 kms.
Though our plans were partly spoilt, we found out later in the day, that we were to have the wildest time of our lives in the form of an evening outing metamorphosising into a scary early 'night safari', which shall be described with a few other events in the next blog, hopefully.