Mumbai to Bangalore Bike Trip

After six years in Mumbai, getting transfered out is an ordeal. Not wanting my Bult to be carted in a train, I decided to drive it down.

The distance from Mumbai to bangalore is 980 km and most blogs say it is a 15 hour non-stop drive by car(I know of people who did it in 11 hours and boast that they were driving slow..Akshay you know whom I am talking about). Since we were driving by bike we assumed an addon of 3 hours. Since the road is part of the Golden Quadrilateral Project I assumed it was decent. PD was the only guy insane enough to come along, for it was a 18 hr ride on a bike.

We started driving at 4am from my place in Powai, and it was a chilly morning with light rain. The road to Lonavala is pretty good as it is the old Mumbai -Pune Highway, the only tricky part is the ghat section about 15 km from Lonavala. We reached Lonavala by about 6 am and switched riders. The road from Lonavala to Pune is very good and we reached Pune bypass by 6.50am. Pune bypass to Satara is one of the best roads I have ever seen in India. It is 4 laned all the way and there are proper road signs. We reached Satara by 8 am and not wanting to stop we pushed on to Kolhapur intending to stop there for breakfast. The road was equally good all the way to Kolhapur, and we reached there by 10.30 and stopped for breakfast at this authentic Maharashtrian cusine place, The food is good and we recommend that you stop too. We started for Belguam at 11am and with the superb roads and we averaging over 70 got us there by 1 pm . There is a ghat section on the way to Belgaum, but it is a oneway; so you can try all the NFS stunts you want to.

After Belgaum, we knew that the roads were bad but little did we expect what we had to ride through. There were numerous diversions killing our speed and there was hardly any road left with all the construction work. Especially the area before Davangiri and near Chitradurg. The roads not only killed our average but also kllled our backs. We reached Chitradurg after nightfall and now I was the only driver as PD was not used to driving the Bult in the dark.

The road from Chitradurg to 15 km from Tumkur is simply super and it is one of those awesome 4 lane roads, and we were back to averaging 70-80 km every hour. We reached Tumkur by 11 pm and there was this bad patch that totally demotivated us, by now both of us wernt in a shape to either drive or to be the pillion. We reached Bangalore by about 12pm and it took us a good one hour to get to Akhil's place at Kormangla (thanks to everyone in Banglore saying 'Strraitu' for every possible direction)

The whole trip was for about 22 Hours and we are proud to say we did it non-stop.