A day out

I never knew, before today, the adventurous me. Nor had I any plans of making an adventurous trip today. However, i did end up in a great place away 'from the maddening crowd' today. it so happpened that my guide had asked me to meet him today. so did somanchi's guide. So the two of us set out from our hall to the insti (which is a rare occasion in final yr given the number of credits and tempo) and to our utter dismay -dismay because I will have to move my ass again sometime to meet him -the guides weren't in their room.

It was then that a wild idea came to me to go to Hong Kong. Now, Hong Kong is a dhaba-type-chinese-restaurant in Salwa. I had heard rave reviews of the restaurant's chicken items...so i suggested to Somanchi to go to Salwa. Now, you tell any damn guy in the insti that you wanna go to salwa from IIT Kharagpur on bicycle and he will tell you are crazy. Salwa is something around 5-6 Kms from our campus. Still we set out, sure that chicken is an item worth the troubles.

And the trip really was a huge success. I mean, there were only the two of us and we were pinned only on the chicken. However, as we rode down the nearly level road to Salwa, there were many beautiful instances to be seen. I had been to Tata Bearings once via the same road on a bike and I hadn't marked the beauties of nature. the equally spaced trees in the forest on both sides presented a real beautiful image. The cool evening breeze was a real revelry.

We reached Salwa after a 5 Km ride and extremely exhausted. He had reached our destination but the road went on. Isn't it surprising that there are millions of roads -pucca and kaccha -in this world!! As Robert Frost had commented in a poem of his, there are numerous roads in the path of life. Ppl generally don't take the road less travelled for the destination and nature of road is uncertain.

Enuf of philosophy. We dashed into Hong Kong and had a stomachful of 'Chicken Momo' and it tasted great. It was the first instance that I took chicken momo. Anyway, before having any more, I wanted to move on to some place. I was in absolute frenzy and wanted to ride on and on to the horizon and the world beyond. Somanchi wasn't too enthusiastic, courtesy the bad condition of his cycle, but I somehow made him come along. A chinki guy in the restaurant (it was a chinese restau..) told us there was a dam some two kilometres farther. Taking his directions on a piece of paper, we set out.

On the path, I observed that there were numerous Chinkis settled in a 'basti' nearby and deduced that they were afterall Indians -may be from Arunachal Pradesh or Sikkim. There were some really sweet chinki girls, but I should admit that my carnal eyes admired their figure more. Unlike the chinese ones, these were tall gals, had not-so-broad-and-flat nose and had great figure to watch. Pity they were living in small hut type dwellings. I wanted to stay on a little and try my luck on one of these but Somachi, the coward ass, suggested 'we are in alien territory and i won't be coming forward to save u if some chinki guy starts beating u up Tai Chi style'. So we moved on. Two kilometres later, we were nowhere near the dam. Actually every one kilometre we asked some guy abt the dam and the answer was 'Just two kilometres from here' invariably.

We were about to give up when we came upon a beautiful land formation. This was virgin land, not exploited by the picnic goers (for I am sure it would make a great picnic spot). It was in fact an old mountain that had weathered into plain land. The land was at some elevation from the surrounding and there were beautiful dykes coming up here and there. Dykes are solid surfaces that don't weather because they are made of stronger material than the surroundings. Most dykes were perfectly vertical but we did find a dyke with some incline to the vertical. We tried to climb it and did succeed. From the top, we could see no one nearby. It was like we were the only ones...the Columbus to discover and claim this land. I was the lord, and as there was no one but the meek Somanchi I was the monarch...the ultimate authority.

I wish I stayed there for long but it was getting dark and we had a lot of space to cover. After dark there won't be any street light in this forested area to help us. So we set back to IIT Kharagpur. On our way back, we found a buddhist monastry (Of course the Chinkis...). Since I had never been to a buddhist monastry, I entered. There was a mysterious ambience inside there. I keenly observed the paintings all around but couldn't make out any of them. I did deduce that they were from the jataka tales signifying the various births of the Buddha as King, Elephant, Monkey etc. We found a monk around but he was busy chanting some mantras in a language i couldn't decipher.

In short, it was a trip worth the pains of 15 Kms of ride.