Bicycle Ride along Forest and Farmland in the Melagiri Hills

July 10 - 11, 2026

After the Yercaud bicycle ride, I knew that I wanted my next ride to feel just as green and scenic but somewhere I hadn't been before. I also wanted to ensure that scenic rides are supposed to be about the scenery, not about gasping my way up a gradient with my eyes fixed on the road three feet ahead of me. So this time I brought a brand-new T-Rex eBike with a hub motor, and a planned to let it do the heavy lifting on the climbs so I could actually look around.

The destination was the Melagiri hill range, a lesser-known stretch of the Eastern Ghats located between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, around 2-hour drive from Bangalore. It is elephant country and home to the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary. I stayed at a nice yet rustic farmhouse in Vannathipatti village and chalked out a bicycle route toward Andevanapalli and back.

The Route

I started at 6:30 in the morning, while the air was still cool and the light was still soft. It had rained the previous evening. 

From the farmhouse, I turned onto Anchetty road and continued toward Andevanapalli, weaving through small villages where curious locals looked twice at the sight of me with helmet, bike shorts, and an odd-looking eBike. It's a fair reaction. In three hours of riding, I didn't see a single other recreational cyclist. A few outsiders passed through in cars, and a couple of motorcycle groups went by, but the road otherwise belonged to farmers, and their animals.

Monsoon had set in and everything around me was that particular shade of green that only shows up after a good rain. 

The paved road towards Kundhukottai rolled in gentle ups and downs, with the Ayur forest on one side of the road and rocky hillsides rising just behind it. 

Some stretches of the road disappeared under a canopy of trees with branches meeting overhead like a green tunnel. They looked too good to ride past, and I kept stopping to take pictures. That is the real advantage of a bicycle ride. It is so easy to stop, click a photo, and carry on, something you’d think twice about if you were driving through the same stretch.

On the other side, farmland opened up ploughed fields, the farmers working with tractors or in some cases with traditional ox, and that unmistakable, earthy smell of cattle and goats grazing along the side of the road.

This stretch of Melagiri is part of an elephant corridor, and I rode with that fact quietly present in my mind, though the only animals that I actually crossed paths with were cattle walking across the road at their own pace, and a troop of monkeys stationed exactly where they knew travellers are likely to stop. 

On the way back, I gave in to a small detour towards Seengkottai village, following the road as it began to climb steadily toward a hill. I rode until the gradient got serious, decided I'd rather save that particular challenge for another day, and turned back toward the farm.

Riding the T-Rex e-Bike

This was the eBike's first real outing, and I went in with a simple rule for myself which was to pedal always, let the motor assist only when the terrain demanded it. Whenever the road tilted upward, I bumped the pedal-assist level to 1 or sometimes 2. I could hear the hub motor's faint hum kick in and I could pedal all the way without straining. The moment the road flattened or tipped downhill, I dropped assist back to zero and let gravity and my own effort do the work braking often on the descents to keep things controllable rather than letting the bike run away with itself.

The company advertises around 40 km of range on level ground running purely on the motor. I covered 45 km in about three hours while pedalling the entire way and only used up half the battery which tells me the bike is going to be a genuinely capable companion for longer, hillier rides without turning into a range anxiety exercise.

Compared to Yercaud, where I remember long stretches where the climb consumed all my attention and energy. Here, I could look up. I could actually watch the tree line, notice the rock formations, slow down for cattle on the road, and stop wherever a view demanded a photograph of the road curving away, the forest on one side, the fields on the other, or a village going about its unhurried morning.

The Farmhouse, and the Quiet After

The farmhouse turned out to be the right kind of base for this trip. I was the only guest that night, and the caretaker's family took care of all my meals. The farmhouse looks out at the hills on one side and open farmland on the other, and despite being told that elephants move through the area at night, I never felt uneasy. The place had a settled, watched-over calm to it, the kind that only comes from people who've lived alongside that landscape for a long time.

I rested a bit at the farmhouse after the ride. Finally it was time to go, and so I loaded the bicycle into the back of the SUV and began the drive back to Bangalore, already turning the morning experience over in my head. 

Rural India, seen from a bicycle seat at a slow pace, has a different rhythm entirely - unhurried, mostly kind, largely indifferent to whatever strange spectacle rolls through on two wheels.