Monday, December 23, 2013

MTB Exploration Thiruporur

Winter was slipping out too fast and we had to utillize the most of it in Chennai. A quick scan of satellite view of chennai surroundings showed some amazing green offroad trails to the south of chennai near Thiruporur. quickly made 4 loops of trails and named them MTBX1-4. The following 4 posts will be the exploration of these trails.

Making a trail:
Just want to shed some light on how easy it is to make a trail. You just need to log in to Google maps and create a new map. just look out for the satellite view and mark the trails in a nice 5-10 km loop. Then get the link of the trail that you marked as shown below:

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Next step is to paste this link in http://www.gpsvisualizer.com and get the GPX file. You can upload this GPX file in any Garmin GPS and load the trail using the software "EasyGPS". in some of the GPSes, you can also load the base map in terrain or satellite views to getter a better view of the elevation up ahead. This can be done by uploading the google earth files kmz/kml in your GPS. Its pretty simple once you get the hang of it.

MTBX1

Coming back to the MTBX1, there were plenty of offroad trails and a few of us (just 3) set out to explore the first one I marked. The trail started off along the OMR entering into the dense eucalyptus plantation. The trails were full of sand and the knobbies were having time of their life. This was much more than our expectations

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Thanks to the late monsoon last year, all the backwaters around the mahabalipuram area were full of water and the climate around them was very nice.

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The trails were covered and thorny. it was a single path where only cycles and bikes could go. It was getting better and better and we were happy to discover such an exotic place just 20kms south of town

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A few kilometers down the line, the trails led to properly laid Jeep tracks which was a bit of a challenge to navigate thanks to the recent rains.

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Every now and then, we kept crossing lakes and eucalyptus plantations around them and lots of single trails. Its really hard to navigate here and it was good that we carried a pre-loaded trail on GPS

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To end with, almost like icing on the cake, the trails were passing through the paddy fields which were fully grown and green! What more could we ask for!

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Link to the full Album
https://www.facebook.com/arunsekhar1/media_set?set=a.10151441073586514.542269.658486513&type=3

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