A Donkey's Tales: The Ambavani Ride : Lessons with Guru Ajaz!

Rain gods sent their blessings one more time on Friday and seemed like a perfect chance to experience a bit of what I missed by not riding in the monsoons. Saturday was spent asking questions to prospective employees and getting knocked out with dumba$$ answers most of the time. A ride out on Sunday (26/11/06) seemed even more necessary.
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Besides the now regular riding mate (read Donkey) Satyajeet, we had 2 more Donkey's (Kedar - Satyajeet's friend & Dharam - my friend and now in the interest of spreading global peace, we are all friends!) and a Rare-Enlightened animal (Ajaz) this time. The 2 Donkey's riding pillion on mine & Satyajit's bike (I checked my email. He is Satyajeet with an 'I'! Sorry Bro!) and the RE (Rare-Enlightened) riding on his own set of wheels.
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Initially, we were to meet at 6am on Sunday morning for a ride to 'A'Ambey Valley. Then as time went by, I made it 7am hoping that I would get to sleep more! Then Satyajit calls me at 10pm to tell me that Ajaz planned to get his 9yr old son for the ride and I pretty much lost hope. Was it going to be how-to-baby-sit-a-teen-on-2wheels session? Just to clarify, the son had become 12yr old by the time we met for the ride and Ajaz spoke about his exploits that included skidding an Activa!. Then Dharam gets lost while coming to my place and reaches only at 6.45am. Getting lost is not a great start to any ride! But all in all, we finally grouped together at Tata Motors, Wakdewadi at 7.50am and took our breakfast halt at 8.15am at a tapri just before Alfa Laval in Chinchwad. As per Ajaz, this place served the best tea and he was damn right!
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There are a lot many as-per-Ajaz to follow on the log and a lot of them, if not true, atleast make do for a hearty laugh. In fact the ride will surely be remembered coz of all the wisecracks from Ajaz aka 'The Guru'. For those of you who need to know more about The Guru, please read the reviews of the Hollywood movie by the same name starring Jimmy Mistry! I can't say more else this blog might get far too many hits than I want it to get! :)
FYI - For those who are still hitting my blog, please go hit this link instead to know more about The Guru, the movie. For Guru Ajaz, read on this page!
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I know Ajaz is gonna weigh heavy on this post but lets move on. 8.30am in the morning and perfect weather for riding. Its slightly cold, no sun yet, cloudy and looked like it must be raining somewhere. Ajaz raced away, he wont let me write a sentence without him being thrown in somewhere, riding an Ambition-135 deciding to 'unnerve' (he said that word) a coupla guys on Karizma. Sure unnerved the rest of us! Me & Satyajit were riding at 55kmph. I don't really need to say much about the roads since I've already spent enough words on how good NH4 was in my post about the trip to Bombay. So the Bullets didn't need any gear shifts, no braking, just-hang-legs-in-crash-guard riding for miles and miles.
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We made it to Lonavala at 10am. Not bad at all but it had started getting bright and sunny. After chewing down chips, club sandwich and two plates of bhajiya with two cups of tea each, we took off on the road towards Aambey Valley. Its 21kms from Purohit Sweets shop on the Pune-Lonavala road. Actually the stop was pretty eventful with me getting a call to my in-laws that made sure I had to carry back 2kgs of Chikki (on Dharam's shoulders!). Then The Guru speaks the first words of Gyan - 7 outta 10 women have fat rear. I had to present this fact keeping in mind that there would be women reading this post! But The Guru's ardent followers can trust me that the stats are exactly as uttered by The Guru. And the stats, if not true across the globe, seemed fairly in line with what we saw at Lonavala locally! Now I'm as much an MBA in Marketing as anyone else since I know the key funda told by Kedar - The fortune lies at the bottom of the pyramid. Well Kedar, I'm already at the bottom and will firmly remain there waiting for the fortune! Then the Jawani-69 story unravelled by Satyajit & The Lounge concept proudly presented by Kedar. There was really a hell lot of talk about what place grows better quality weed, Warje, Talegaon or Manipur or some godforsaken place that I wasn't even sure was on the Indian maps! The experts were of course Satyajit and Kedar, both having spent a solid year on Symbiosis campuses studying both temporary and permanent effects of weed on human brains. I had lost mine completely by then! :)
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Next stop was Tiger Hill. Extremely boring place with nothing to talk about. Just another edge of the hill really. And the story behind its name is even more lame than the place itself. Tiger hill, why? Coz Lion's Club developed this place! Have we heard of anything more ridiculous than this? Some will say yes, but that's at the end after reading the conversations amongst the group I've posted here. :)

But Tiger Hill has great significance on this ride. Its here under a tree that The Guru imparted lots of Gyan to us. The scene can be visualized on the lines of Buddha's enlightenment under the great Banyan tree with some minor tweaks. Okay, major tweaks, but its still close! The blog would turn into a text book with eager students shredding it to get gyan if I were to post all the pearls of wisdom. But the most important and life changing learning's were : (1)Pigs are happier than Lion's. Ultimately its quality that counts and not quantity. This fact has been proven right by Animal Planet and The Guru himself has seen the program (20times?) (2)Sometimes men work like dogs. Its not that bad after all. This aint a joke! (3)Men should not be guilty of looking at other women. It has been scientifically proven and well documented in books (that The Guru has read. Hopefully!) that men are polygamous while women are monogamous. So don't fight nature, just go with the flow! (The Guru says so, not me!)
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After the class, we went further ahead from Tiger Hill towards Aambey Valley. Now I seriously don't know if renaming a small hamlet-Ambavani, on a remote corner of a hill, as Ambey Valley would help sell wooden houses worth 2crores at a minimum. I'm sure it didn't coz very soon they had to rely on numerology. So Ambey Valley is now 'A'ambey Valley! I'm still yet to see any positive effects of the change since it looked like the only people who lived on the hill were still the locals from Ambavani. So they have probably tried to entice the stinking rich with Porche's. A Blue Carrera 4S zipped by us and was later seen doing crazy rounds screeching tyres on the airstrip in Aambey Valley. A Porche World Road show was on! Spotted were the Blue Carrera 4S, a White Cayenne Turbo S and a Yellow Boxter-S convertible!
For more Porche - click here.
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Coming back to Aambey Valley, the roads leading to it are one of the best ghat sections I've ridden on. Super smooth with lotsa twisties and absolutely-straight-up climbs. And beautiful and clear signs all over the place giving ample warnings of sharp turns. The place itself is nothing as grand as its made out to be in ads, which was to be expected.

But I'm sure we would have had a more favourable disposition towards it had we been there during monsoons. Another thing that's to be expected is that you will be denied an entry unless you are driving in with a set of at least 4wheels (on one vehicle okay?) that cost at least 10lacs. Else go to some office in Bombay, pay 3 grand for entry and roam inside the whole day. Of course food, water and restroom visits charged extra! JH Christ!

The only display bungalow (that's what it must be!) visible on top of the hill looked ok. Maybe its good inside but we wont know that just yet. After doing tourist-giri (Addition to vocabulary courtesy Satyajit) and clicking pictures, we started back towards Lonavala.
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I'v forgotten about the conversation during lunch! The chicken was good though. I'm a bad student! How can one forget what The Guru said? Nyways. We had to rush back coz Satyajit had already lied to us at the begining that he needed to get back by 12pm. We started at 2.45pm from Lonavala and after having tea at Central Hotel on Dehu-Aundh junction on NH4, we head back into pune. Me & Dharam hit home by 4pm and I'm sure Satyajit made it home by 4pm too, well in time for what ever he had planned! A day well spent that left everyone happy I hope. I was quite tired and by the time I made it back from Aundh, I was ready to go dead. 11.30pm till 6am is pretty good sleep by any standards!
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About the bike itself. The most neglected part of the ride so far. Err, you can't do much of cornering on a Bullet. And definitely not with a pillion on. The positives of a disc were so clearly visible. Its not easy to stop a 165kg bike carrying around the same weight on a really steep down hill gradient. It was scary at first but the brakes worked really well! But with power of 18hp@5000rpm & torque of 32NM@3000 rpm, you would expect not many gear shifts. This is where you are caught dead wrong. '4' is just another number between 3rd and 5th gear and the bike refuses to do much more than continuing on what ever speed you already are. Its either 3rd or 5th! 3rd when you want it to pull and 5th when you dont want it to fall apart in 3rd since you are hitting the redline rpm-wise! Plus it sputters endlessly a lot of times as if its choking for fuel. Lets out a sneeze sometimes and goes dead stop at uphill sections when you go slow before changing into a lower gear. Maybe its my bike with dirty air & fuel filters and spark plugs. Satyajit's bike didn't seem to have any such issues. Fuel efficiency? Awful with a pillion on when you are navigating ghats. I filled in 5.59lts of fuel at 2300kms and it hit reserve at 2441kms. Thats 25kmpl only! Now again, my bike has done its first servicing only & that too at 800kms. Its also very close to 2nd servicing at 2500kms now so the oils have pretty much lost their magic. Hopefully things will improve. But talk of riding comfort and it hauls 2 80kg adults on ghats quite admirably. We didnt feel the fatigue during the ride at all. I do have aching back this morning but I know one ends up with much more on other bikes. The handle bar position and properly padded seat (of the bike okay?) make it good for long hauls. But the foot rests are a little too forward for tall guys and my hip joints hurt after while, especially in the city.
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All said and done, a weekend spent well! I will do the Aambey Valley route on the Comet, that will be some fun! Konkan soon...else Mahabaleshwar atleast with now only 1 weekend left to ride before I leave on my vacation! Rides stop for a while but I hope the fun doesn't end! :)
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Random Snaps ==>
That's Kedar, Satyajit & Dharam from L to R ==>