A colorful Road Trip

A road trip typically combines the thrill of driving your own car through countryside and highways with the freshness of seeing rural and natural sights that one gets un-used to seeing in a city. In a road trip natural colors are easy to come by. Here are some colours of Karnataka that that we saw flying around us in the Ghats and along the coastline.

That the Western Ghats are green is common knowledge. The myriad shades of green shone by the tea gardens of Kalasa, Kudremukh and Samse, coffee plantations stretching from Sakleshpur to Mudigere and the sporadic deciduous and rare coniferous foliages sprouting out from deep red mountain soil remind you that tropical heaven is only a few hours drive away from home- the natural red and green.

Green is also the color of hope. The Shiradi Ghat road renovation project gives hope that the Mangalore Bangalore corridor will boost economic growth over the next decade more than what the recently inaugurated railway track will. The 9 inch thick tarmac starting Sakleshpur and the 1 foot thick concrete beams at the hairpin bends are being laid out with deliberation. Making no mistakes this time, the road has been closed to heavy traffic and opened to only controlled private car/light vehicular traffic.

The Greater Mangalore, if you may, area is poised to see amazing growth in the next few years. The infamous, for road accidents, NH17 belt going north from Mangalore is seeing new shades of grey- those of concrete and tarmac laid in the form of four-lane if not six-lane expressway complete with underpass and flyovers. The road will be made safe by itself. Left to man's fancies, however, nothing is safe.

All this, on top of the existing airway, railway will bootstrap the connectivity of the ports and upcoming SEZs with the hinterland. New SEZs for an energy company and several IT companies will lift this town from its tier 2 status to metro in the next decade.

That apart, the blue skies above and backwaters abutting the highway remind you that it is a little too unusual for rains to cause havoc in the evenings. What ought to be pink and blue- the two colors of spring- actually make you think black for the dark evening skies as well as the creeping impact of global warming. Forget that and the white sands of Maravanthe and the aquamarine waters of the sea beyond bring you right back to where we intended to spend one afternoon. Hot, you bet, and sultry worsened by last night's rain.

The legacy of the dynasties remnants of one of which, Hoysalas, we visited at Belur and Halebid ought to carry a bright orange glow. Orange is the color of endurance. That such intricate sculpture work has weathered nature and foreign invasions through the years is a testimony to capabilities and talents of a foregone era. The ornate pillars of the Chennakeshava temple, the hallmark of Hoysala architecture, is replete with the traditional jewellery designs that find their way into contemporary ornaments. The black polished pillars of the Jain Basadhi at Halebeedu even after close to a thousand years reflect the visitors' awestruck faces as if they were built yesterday. The musical notes that can be drawn out from the lightly constructed pillars strike the right chords of surprise.

Looking out for all these colors, we drove out of urban landscape on a Monday dawn, drove through the hinterland and ghats smelling coffee, tea, tender cashew, damp paddy and sugarcane fieldsdown to the hot coastal belt. We drank a lot of tender coconut, locally made carbonated jeera and ginger coolers sun-burned ourselves, sweated out in buckets, swallowed oodles of fresh air, woke up in the mornings to rare sounds of common birds, dug our heels in hot white sands, learned that Kudremukh National Park is replete with vistas of dark green and blue mountains against a pastel blue sky and also learned that exploration of Karnataka by road on our own car is the next best way to do it; the best way is on a bike such as an Enfield.

We returned four nights later content for now but thirsty for more, covering more than twelve hundred kilometers but not tired, intemittently cut off from communications like cell and email but not feeling any bad about it to the home-city happy but not too happy about it.

The colors we saw in this road trip are just a few sprinkles. There is a whole rainbow out there in Karnataka.