Day 8- The day we pushed the cycles.

  This day we traveled around 40 km today which was supposed to be a silly distance compared to the 75 km that we covered from Kollam to Thiruvananthapuram. Under estimation- serious under estimation.  Route Pattanamtitta – Ranni – Vechuchira ( Erumeli ).   Pathantitta – Ranni was peaceful. We covered that 19 km in an hour. Ranni - Vechuchira was hell and heaven combined. The hills that we cover today from Ranni to Vechuchira were very very steep and insanely long. There is not much of altitude difference between the two points Pathanamtitta and Erumeli, but all the way it was steep  1 km vertical climb spread out over a horizontal distance of 2 kms, then a 1 km vertical decent. We were literally climbing a hill and then descending. In the beginning we attacked the hills but after long ascend the climb never seemed to end. This was all because we did not take the main road to erumeli. It would be too busy over there with the sabarimala season full in full swing. We had taken the village roads, the reason for the steep uphills and steep downhills. Never did we have to push the cycles at any point of time in the whole journey, and today we pushed, pushed real hard. Each slope we pushed for more than half an hour, but after getting to the top we had this feeling of “Yeah, I earned this ride downhill !!!” . The ride downhill was steep, fast and scary.  But the ride was long…real long …. But just when the we start enjoying for a while, comes the next uphill slope. All that we could do is look at the long steep uphill slope, stare at the slope again to see if the intensity of the slope has decreased or not. Seeing no difference, all we could do was get down from the cycle and start pushing. Multiple gears of our cycle is on no use at all. We have not sweated so much as we have done today. The route from Ranni to Vechuchira even though was very tiring- ohh you have no idea... , the route was through thick lush rubber forest . That was good. Check out the pictures when we upload them.  The net is bad here as well. I am not even sure when this blog will go online.

At Ranni, my mom’s home town, we had breakfast at Renji uncles place.  He had arranged for TV coverage, but we were late by an hour, so they basically went somewhere else anyway. They got more glamorous people for their coverage. Never did I imagine that I would be coming to Ranni on cycle. We snapped a few pics from the front of the house at Ranni and a few pics from the front of the Ithalapally where I got baptized. Visited appans house and we left for Vechuchira when all the climbing happened. Thinking about the climb, we were wondering that if we had had this leg of the journey on day 1 we probably would have abandoned the whole trip. Tomorrow we are going to Kumali. More of pushing tomorrow I guess. :P Lets see… " be optimistic , success lies in confidence " my dad always says

Ha…there was another interesting incident today, we met another cyclist from US. He was cycling alone but he had a car accompanying him. He had already covered munnar, marayur, all that kind of places and he was nearing the end of his journey. We did snap a pic with him. Until next time..