Golden Travels - Kannur to Bangalore by the two-axle B9R!

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