The Cyclist
I ride the same hills I document — because you cannot protect what you have not crossed.
Cycling is how I came to know the Devarayanadurga hills from the inside. Where a vehicle announces itself, a bicycle simply arrives — quietly enough to see the forest as it is, slowly enough to learn its habits.
The bicycle is my other research instrument: it carries me to the survey sites, the vanas and the villages, and it keeps the body that every other calling depends on honest and strong.
The Hills as Training Ground
The terrain of Devarayanadurga — its climbs, its descents, its long stretches of forest road — builds a cyclist's endurance the way no gym can. Every ascent is a conversation between breath and gradient; every descent is trust, technique and attention.
Long rides have become a discipline of the same kind as meditation: hours of steady effort in which the mind settles, the body opens, and the forest speaks.
Rides as Fieldwork
Many of the survey routes and coexistence checkpoints around Devarayanadurga were first covered on two wheels. Cycling gives access to places vehicles cannot reach and keeps a minimal footprint in the very landscape I work to protect.
It is conservation practice at its most literal: to move through the forest while disturbing it as little as possible.
The Rider's Discipline
Cycling teaches what the lineage teaches: pace yourself, watch the terrain, respect the weather, keep going. These are the same rules for climbing, for filming, for field research — and, in the end, for living close to the wild.
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You cannot protect what you have not crossed.
Raghunandan S.