Platform7

I always wanted to travel to Kannur by bus from Bangalore once. The ghat section between Virajpet and Iritty has some brilliant curves – from what I heard. Sometime late last year, I got an opportunity to drive through the route as well. I never had a reason to go to Kannur by bus – always went by car. An opportunity to travel by bus suddenly appeared in the mid of December – a function at my relatives’ place. I had initially planned to avoid the event, but some other personal reasons coerced me to partake in the event. I was going there by car, but the return would be by bus – yippee!! There are only two Volvo services to Kannur – one by Karnataka SRTC and the other by Golden. Golden’s Volvo is special. I first saw this bus in July 2011 – I did not notice what was special with this bus then. I saw the bus again in August 2011 – did not notice anything special even then. But a couple of days later, while looking at the photo of that bus, I noticed that the bus was special – went

The visit to Mumbai was very fruitful – the work we had in Mumbai was finished on the very first day itself. By the evening of our arrival in Mumbai, I was busy searching for return tickets. Dad was keen of reaching back in Bangalore in the morning – 9AM latest. So, I had to search for buses leaving in the afternoon. I had originally planned to try Kesineni or Kallada – but both leave in the evening. I checked for tickets on RedBus, and found out that Sharma, National and Neeta had afternoon departures. I checked the VRL website, and they too had a bus in the timeframe I was looking at – but had seats only in the rear half of the bus. So VRL was ruled out. Neeta was never part of my consideration. I wanted to try MSRTC, but their website was not operating for some vague reason – and I did not want to go to the counter. So the tie was between Sharma and National. I decided to try out National – have heard a lot of good reviews and my calculations showed that it could be an iShift

Mumbai is the city of love for me – it is the only place that I miss a lot. I did my graduation in Mumbai, and like every college going student, enjoyed a lot of the city. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Mumbai is the umpteen varieties of snacks that one can pick up from road-side stalls. I last went to Mumbai in 2009 – and I had been longing to go there once again. There was some reason to visit Mumbai as well – but the trip kept getting delayed time and again due to various reasons. The chance came up finally in December – I and my dad were heading to Mumbai. Trains were ruled out due to lack of tickets and the long running time. So bus it was. I had already shortlisted the operators that I’d look at for the trip (based on various reviews and timings). Selecting the final operator was based on the availability of seats in the front half of the bus and the arrival timings at Mumbai (I preferred an arrival before 9AM). VRL met all my requirements – so VRL it

After booking the tickets for my outward journey, I had a tough time getting tickets for the return. I did not want to spend another night in the bus (I was spending every alternate night in buses that week – and wanted to enjoy that Sunday night in the cosy comforts of the bed at my home). So night buses were ruled out – the only day bus was the Kallada B9R. For some reason, that bus did not have any tickets for that day – there were tickets for Coimbatore-Bangalore in that bus though. I called up Conti, but they did not have tickets for that day. KPN was full as well. I booked on the Hindusthan weekend special day-time service. I chose the first row seats – to enjoy the road ahead and also take advantage of the huge led room. November 18, 2012. 1045hrs: I walked out of Gandhipuram city bus station and headed into the SETC bus station to see if there were some surprises out there. For some reason, my phone wasn’t able to hook on to the network – so did a bit of jugaad (typ