Itinerant: Bike Ride 2 (western ghats)

I had done a solo ride in Jun in my bullet and this time since I had three more people with me, I got little adventurous and planned a route that covers all the major ghats as follows:
Bangalore-Bisle Ghat-Kukke-Dharmasthala-Charmadi Ghats-Kudremukha-Sringeri-Agume Ghats-Kollur-Hulikal Ghats-BaleHonnuru-KemmannuGundi-Bangalore.

Doing the above will perhaps would leave us only a few more ghats to try in Karnataka and it all appeared fine when we started on a bundh day afternoon and cruised peacefully to Hassan for the night stay.

Day 2 started from Hassan and after breakfast at picturesque Ossor Restaurant 5kms before Sakaleshapura, we veered off the Bangalore-Mangalore Highway near Donigala/Manjirabad fort towards Bisle. We were in a great place, lush greenery insterspersed with paddy fields but with bad roads. We took a break when we were about to enter Bisle forest. We realized that one of the tires of a bullet had gone flat. All the four of us were relatively new to biking, atleast Bullets and the inexperience cost us 3.5hrs to repair the same. Then came the treachorous Bisle Ghats where there are no roads of any sort. But it was a great ride in the middle of thick jungle, numerous water falls and without any sight of civilization. Reached Kukke 5hrs behind schedule had a good darshan, rushed to Dharmasthala and retired for the day.

Day 3 started with a refreshing drive through beautiful Charmadi ghats and great "neer dose" at a small, non descript shop at Kottigehara. Suddenly we decided to visit Horanadu temple too. After a mix of good and bad roads, reached Horanadu exactly at lunch time and then proceeded to Sringeri via beautiful Kudremukha forests. There was only one problem though. We had reached Sringeri around 5PM and it was too early to retire, the next stop according to the original plan was to go towards Agumbe, but we were not sure about acommodation there, so we decided to go to Tirthahalli and reached it around 8:30PM. Now Tirthahalli is decently big place, but has hardly has any basic stay options. So we decided to drive further down to Shimoga at 9PM.

This night drive from Tirthahalli to Shimoga turned out to be the high light of the whole ride. The roads are butter smooth and passes thru jungles and the famous Mandagadde bird sanctuary. Four of us were never more disciplined as we followed one another and each one of us taking the turn at the front. It was a wonderful journey as if we were on a mission of sorts.

Day 4 we decided to visit Kemmannugundi. Its another great place. Thought the roads are not well maintained, it was still worth going over there. After spending some time checking out the grand grass lands around this place, we headed back to Bangalore. Close to 1200kms in 3.5 days.

Some photos here.