Kolli Hills – Those bends though.

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I have complained for years about how there isn’t enough quality content on the internet, but I haven’t really tried to change the situation either. Considering I haven’t traveled as extensively as I have wanted to, you would forgive me if I feel I do not have the right to call myself an adventure biker or a tourer yet. But I did feel it would be alright to start documenting a few of my tours. It could help me figure out what I want to write about, and maybe help me see how my journey as a biker started.

My ride to Kolli happened in September of 2018. In the past half a decade or so, Kolli has now become an extremely popular tourist destination. It was not always the case. Kolli hills are captivatingly beautiful. But what interested me more, was the ride to get there. You see ‘Kolli Mallai’ (‘ Mountains of Death’, in Tamil) , is famous for its obscene amount of hair-pin bends to reach the hill top. By an obscene amount, I mean 70. Yes, 70 hair-pin bends. These bends are distributed over 13 kilometers. If you have a queasy tummy, you would probably not enjoy the ride there.

The road from Bangalore to the foothills of Kolli was largely uncomplicated and incident-free. If you do leave early in the morning, do make sure to visit Murugan idly shop. It’s proper, proper Tamil Nadu food and I am sure nothing along that way beats the taste and authenticity.

The other thing one might notice is the clear and blatant trademark infringement of Tamil Nadu’s famous restaurant chain Saravana Bhavan. The number of restaurants pretending to be the original to rope in unsuspecting non-tamilians into their fore is unbelievable. It was a pretty fun game identifying the number of iterations of the original. I think I got to around 30 before I completely gave up. A few of the fakes included – Sharavana Bhavan, Saravana Bhavana, Salem Sharavana Bhavan, New Salem Saravan Bhavan, Shravan Bhavan. You get the gist.

The other thing one might notice is almost all the road signs were in Tamil, and it would have been difficult navigating without Google maps.

I was accompanied by my friend Aayush as a pillion for this ride. The ride was unsurprisingly, kind of hard on him; considering he hadn’t really done a ride over 150kms before. Kolli was around 330 kilometers one way, and the pillion seat of my Dominar isn’t that comfortable.
His un-comfortableness became pretty vocal once the ascent to the hill began. My over-enthusiasm to lean over the bends would certainly not have helped. So we stopped whenever we could to get a few pictures.

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Once we did reach the top of the hills, we were greeted with some absolutely gorgeous looking roads.

Once we did reach villages that were habitated, I was quick to wonder what else did Kolli have to offer. There were exactly 2 things. A waterfall that takes a 1000 step trek to get there, and a sunset view point.

I do relish a good trek and was excited to go to the waterfall. So my friend and I started the trek.

Around half way through, we were greeted by folks coming back from the waterfall, being thoroughly disappointed. We were told there’s little to no water and it is definitely not worth the effort to get there. Aayush and I wondered if we should give up getting down the 550 stairs we had left. You see, we aren’t the giving up type. 550 stairs? That’s not gonna stop us from reaching the so called waterfall, right? RIGHT?!

Or so we thought.

We gave up. We came right back up and towards the bike.

A local forest ranger informed us about a lake with paddle boating in it. So off we went.

The boats were ancient but thankfully for all parties involved, they stayed afloat and were controllable enough that we could make our way back to the shore in an hour.

From thereon, we pushed off towards the sunset-view point.

The first thing I noticed there, notwithstanding the view, was the human propensity to destroy everything we touch. The thousands of plastic water bottles, chips and biscuit wrappers, used diapers and sanitary pads just thrown around the mountain side. To add insult to injury, broken beer bottles improperly disposed right around the parking lot. It pains me to no end how inconsiderate we are, as a species.

We had initially planned on going back to Bangalore after the view-point, but a thunderstorm washed away our plan to do so.
Thankfully, Kolli was commercial enough to have several guest houses and we could get a room without much trouble.

Watching the thunderstorm in itself was an innate experience. On a moonless night, with no electricity back up, one could see how the entire mountain range was illuminated each time there was lightning. It was amazing to experience that. First, comes the realisation that there is absolutely no sound other than the pouring rain, then there are multiple crackles of lightning, bright enough to illuminate the entire hill. Then, deafening thunder.

We left early morning from Kolli at 5:30 hrs. It was foggy and the roads were very wet. It was a fun descending the hill. Not being able to lean during the corners(My pillion was pretty happy) due to the weather conditions while still making my way down was a unique challenge.

All in all, I feel Kolli Hills has the potential to be an amazing tourist destination.I just wish the government took enough initiative to provide infrastructure for a town that is getting increasingly popular among the crowd.