Horsley. Musing.

October 09, 2016

Horsley. Musing.

I have missed out on a lot of things and moments in my life due lethargy. To call it lethargy is to put it in mild terms and laziness is the real enemy that I have been fighting for quite a long time. I would have possibly lost this post as well to that evil enemy if I hadn’t watched ‘Kammattipaadam’ the other day. No, the movie doesn’t deal with cliché bullshit that will inspire you to get your ass out of the bed and get shit done. The movie is not about a specific theme but tells us a lot about several things in my perspective. The movie got to the bottom of my heart in a lot of scenes and a lot of dialogues. Well, I am not going to write my first movie review here but I thought, it would be unfair if I didn’t mention about the movie that got me to write a blog post at 3 in the morning. Those who understand Malayalam, do watch this one. In the worst case you may not like it, but you won’t be bored and will definitely have a lot to reflect on once the credits start rolling up the screen.

This post is about the trip we went to Horsley Hills 7 months back and I just realized that it was total injustice I did to this beautiful place by not writing about it. To be honest, this post was never written not just because of my laziness but it was also majorly due to the fact that I was not much in favour of writing about the hills. Horsley was a magic for me. A magic that quite convinced me how contradictions and ironies could be as real and solid as anything that we find rational in our perspective. Horsley made me question whether the things what we perceive as coincidence are really coincidences or if they are related to anything that we know in a way that we don’t realize.

We all look for ironies or contradictions only to prove that something is wrong and I strongly doubt if we have ever had multi-dimensional thoughts about these two things. We look for contradictory statements while arguing with someone so that we can prove that they are wrong, but ask yourself if you have ever thought whether two contradictory statements could ever co-exist. I have never thought that way until I went to this place. Horsley showed me the magic of peace, calmness, beauty, and serendipity that was quite unmatched. I can say without a second thought that five of us had our serotonin levels at its peak for the entirety of the time we spend there. I grew in my respect to this place for making my trip, through the furnace like terrains of Andhra, totally worth. And I thought the better way to pay my respect to the hill was to keep it less known to people so that it gets exploited lesser. I decided to not write about the place in a hope to make it less vulnerable to human infection. I have reasons for thinking so.

I have never enjoyed calmness, peace, and beauty in any other place as much as I had enjoyed it here and I am very well convinced that all those qualities will slowly erode down the slopes of this beautiful hill once it becomes a popular tourist destination. I didn’t want to contribute my share to this possible tragedy and I decided to do my bit for this hill by keeping my mouth shut about it (I know that the audience of this blog is a negligible lot and the kind of attention that this particular post might bring to this place will probably be invisible. But, still). However, I have changed my mind and I thought I should start writing so that I can at least make an appeal to people to keep this place clean if they are planning to visit it ever.

This is a series of hills located off Madnapalle Town in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh and has nothing in common with the geography surrounding it. There were five of us on three bikes and we had started off early morning around 6 o clock, which helped us to escape from the unforgiving temperatures of Andhra during the onward journey. You will enjoy the comfort of the Kolar express way up until Hoskote and this is definitely a good warm up ride before you hit the Hoskote – Chintamani road. The road continues to be four lane for a considerable distance more and then narrows down to two lanes. You will definitely be rewarded for the rest of the distance on this road if you are an early bird and make it to this stretch by daybreak. A few of the things that could play spoiler for this stretch, otherwise, is heat, very high vehicle traffic (including long distance trucks), and the occasional potholes that can be really annoying on a crowded road. However, you don’t have to worry about all these unless you decide to get up late for your ride.

The squad included me, Anshu, Rion, Sonakashi, and the new dude Mayank. Rion and Mayank own a Duke 390 and an RC 390 respectively and I could feel the irritation caused to them by me and my slowly aging baby R15 on the expressways. They had to ensure that minimum throttle was used to ‘keep up’ with my pace on their mighty beasts during the highway stretch but all of us managed to be on the right rhythm once the express ways were over. You will totally enjoy the ride up until the border if you watch out for occasional trucks and potholes. Fair share of curves with good visibility is guaranteed and one can be reassured that they won’t get bored of riding for a major share of the travel. However, things change once you cross the border and I got a bit insecure about the driving style, which I would call reckless, of the local populace.

You will find autos, bikes, tractors, bullock carts etc. appearing in front of you suddenly out of nowhere and I would warn you to be extra cautious to remain safe for the remaining stretch. Autos will stop at intersections, the drivers will look at you, give you a feeling that they are going to wait until you pass them, and when you are confident enough to maintain the throttle level at the same and approach them, they will cross the road without giving you a clue about what is happening and a second’s delay in your response could turn out to be fatal. I couldn’t rule out this kind of behaviour to be odd cases since this is the way of driving I witnessed for the rest of my ride through Andhra.

The next stretch of your awesome ride starts when you start the ascend towards Horsley hilltop which is a good 9 Km of fine engineering. Zero potholes, perfectly even surface, numerous curves and hairpin bends with good banking, mesmerizing view of the valley on one side of the road which will later give way to the mind blowing eucalyptus forests that shadows the tarmac for the remaining stretch etc. are just a few awesome things to mention about the climb. We did not find even a single vehicle during the entire ride to the hilltop and we enjoyed the eerily calm atmosphere created by the forest by the sides of the road.

The Hilltop

The eerie atmosphere remained even after we reached the hilltop because what we rode into was a something that looked much like a ghost town. There was a small village on the left side of the road as soon as we reach the top, which promised a human presence but there was nothing evident to suggest anything in that direction. My pre-ride research had suggested that the hilltop was inhabited by a small pack of local tribes and people of other communities who moved here over the period of time but the human activities here seemed to be very minimal. The irony is that there are numerous buildings including a police station, bungalow, club house, hotels, restaurants, resorts etc. but a good percentage of them remained locked from outside even when we left the hill at around after 12 o clock. This is definitely not something I am complaining about the place but this is the reason what made the trip totally worth.

The famous rocky slopes that you see in google image search results is right on the left side of the road as soon as you reach the hilltop and we parked our bikes and walked down the serene hill further down (There is a fine you have to pay if you take your bike down on the slope and get caught). The area covered by the slope is so huge that it could accommodate enough people for a ‘SunBurn’ event and was left totally to us for the entire time we spent there. We had reached here before 9 o clock and unlike the extremely dry, and hot geography of the plain, the hill had very cool atmosphere with an amazing vegetation that would make one question about the location where it is situated. We sat there until after 11 o clock enjoying the beauty of the place over some drags of fine grass. Honestly we didn’t do anything silly except for the creepy stories Rion tried to narrate to contribute to the haunted look of the place. Rion is one smart chap who kept the life up during the entire trip with his jokes and timely dialogues. No wonder why he became an Army officer in the making and I would be proud to call him Lt. Rion Varghese soon enough once he is out of the academy. I remember the story that he quickly made up about the place being haunted when a random tractor passed beside the restaurant where we were having lunch. He picked up some quick points that all of us had noticed about the place and connected all of them to tell us that the place is haunted and the tractor that went by was used to dump the dead bodies. This will sound silly when you read about it now but was totally an entertainer while we were at the restaurant enjoying our food.

You can stare at the vast expanse of the land until your eyes hurt but you still won’t get bored of the view. With the cool breeze and pin-drop silence, this hill is a perfect example of that mighty artist’s wonderful creations. There is this song lyrics in ‘Kammattippadam’ in which the son asks his dad ‘whether the food we consume, whether the mountains that we see are ours?’ and his dad replies saying that ‘they are not ours, but everyone’s son’. Upon hearing this lyrics, I remembered the innumerable times I sat on hilltops staring at the beauty surrounding it and asking myself if there was a way I could grab what I see and keep it with me for the rest of my life. I would ask this every time I admired the nature because most of the times what I saw was just peace and nothing else. I would tell myself that I rode to this tranquil world which would soon become fiction for me as soon as I ride back into the real world where I belong and later realize that it is just a lie because it is not the place that I live, where I really belong.

The movie tells on a light note about the hell that man have made this beautiful earth and it reminded me about what I was thinking while I was at Horsley. I was just thinking about what I keep on telling myself every time I go for trips and it is nothing but human beings were possibly what went wrong with creation. However, this particular thought contradicts my own belief because I know that there are all sorts of people and it is not collectively that we contributed to anything bad that happened to our beautiful planet. Because there are millions of people who contributed to the cause making everyday life easier for every one of us and the people with the wrong attitude could still be a minority.

However, this minority can cause a much severe impact on places like Horsley than the positivity spread by the good lot. Used syringes, and broken beer bottles spread around the slope is the perfect example for our lack of respect towards things that need to be respected. I was just hoping that tourism in this hill failed and the place somehow lost its position on the tourism map so that it will be preserved without any damage. Anyway, I leave it up to fate because I firmly believe that everything that happens, happens for a reason and the coincidences we see are not really coincidences after all. How we happened to choose this place for the trip is a very strange story, and this story is something that tells me why coincidences might have something meaningful behind them, which we will find out only if we dig deep enough.

Me and Anshu were having lunch at office cafeteria and were discussing about which place to go for a trip a week before we went. Anshu suggested the name Horsley and suddenly gave a very puzzled and confused look right after mentioning it. I said we could consider it even though it is in Andhra and I agreed to research about it. The funny thing is, both of us didn’t know anything about the place at all and that was the reason for her puzzled look. In fact, Anshu can’t even remember where the name Horsley came to her mouth from. She claims that it was the first time she said that word ever and she had absolutely no idea whether a place with that name really existed. For some reason I had an image that such a place existed and it was in Andhra but I too didn’t have a legitimate information about the place prior to this incident. When you look at the series of events that happened, everything is purely coincidental. But, just like the Breaking Bad dialogue where White tells Jesse about the probability of so and so things happening in order for a particular situation to occur was very narrow and that fact itself proves that things don’t happen just coincidentally. I like to believe that there is much more to all these than just a coincidence. It might take some more time to figure out though.

The township on the hilltop is aimed at resort tourism and there are a quite a few resorts to which people had started coming by noon. The deserted look might have had something to do with the time of our arrival and I might be wrong in the judgement I made about the human presence here. However, we found it quite difficult to find some food because most of the hotels were not operational at that time but we managed to find one that was open after some searching. They had just Puri, Dosa, Chutney and Bhaji if I recollect correctly (7 months is long enough to forget minor facts I guess) and we ordered the same for us. The food was quite good and we spent some more time there since we were the only customers and the guy at the place was in no rush to ask us to leave.

We didn’t delay it much and started our ride back because Mayank had a flight to catch the same day. The cool weather on the top was replaced by the furnace like plains once we reached down and the ride back is something I would like to erase out of my memory. I could literally feel the heat radiating out of the ground and all of us grew quite tired by the time we covered half the distance. Not to mention the increased traffic and annoyance caused by it but yeah, happiness comes with a price every time and I would like to think only about the time we had spent on top of Horsley.

Horsley you beauty, I promise to come visit you again. Don’t lose your charm.

Photoboothhh!!!