Blogging was never on my mind. After reading several blogs of my buddies, finally I decided there was no better way to express myself other than blogging. As this is my first blog, I decided to start off with one of my latest trek experience.
I think it was some time in June of 2008, where during a cup of coffee with my colleagues, I came up with a plan for our next trek. By the way, we are around 4 in my company who are kinda regular trekkers, and there will be al teast one in every 3 months.
Believe it or not, the actual date for the trek was during the December shutdown holidays. As people say, the fun is all in the planning than execution, we just wanted to spend little bit more time in planning and it turned out to be too much of a time. Any way, in none of my previous trek, I had ever camped over night, and it was my long standing wish to camp in middle of a forest during our trek and there was no better place to start off for that than Tadiyandamol. As december approached, all most every day we had discussion on this. We even purchased sleeping bags for this. Finally the day ha
d come.
It was December 26th 2008. We left Banglore in Sandeep's car on our way to Coorg. Donald had booked home stay for us near kakkabe in Virajpet taluk. Srinidhi (one of our collegue who was passion for cars) was the driver. We all met at mysore road junction at 7:30 AM in the morning and finally we started off for one of the most anticipated trek for me. There were 2 cars. In one, there was myself, Sandeep, Donald and Srinidhi - the driver. On the other car, there was srini and his family including this brother and cousin. On the way in Mysore Road, we filled our bellys at "Kamath Lokaruchi". On the way we took deviation to Sangama and spent some time there. Then we started off to our destination. We reached hunsur and took deviation to Virajpet.
As we approache Virajpet, we were driving through end less coffee estates. Finally we reached Virajpet and from there it was around 30 kms to kakkabe (where we had booked our home stay). I dont remember when I slept during the drive, but when I woke up, first think I noticed was a board saying "Way to Kaveri Estate". It was such a coincident, none of other 3 in the car saw that and I woke from from no where to see this board. If we had missed that, we would have definitely roamed around kakkabe for another 2 hours, considering our mobile single was hardly visible. Finally, after a looong drive, we reached the home stay. Well, they say in home stay you are supposed to stay in home, but we ended up staying in rooms out side home. Any way, we were leased bothered about that and all our focus was on next day morning's trek. It was a quite a bit relaxing evening that day. People at home stay had arranged for camp fire and in the process we filled our tummies as well. It was a tiring day and we all had nice sleep dreaming about next days trek.
Finally the day had arrived and we were all set for the trek. We were 7 in total and each one had enough load which reminded me of school days bag. Believe me, I had never carried so much load since my school days. All our bags were stuffed with sleeping bags, ten
t, food and most importantly water. We went in some TATA vehicle to the starting point of the trek. By the way, we some how managed to get a bottle for diesel for our planned camp fire. Then the trek was started. As usual, srini was in the front and sandeep was way back. I was kinda in the middle, enjoying the scenic views which was helping me forget the thirst and tiredness. We took several breakes in between.
Finally we had first sight of the peak far from where we were. Believe me, it was such a pleasant sight, it all most made my day. But I knew, the trek is not done until I reach the top. In between we took a break as well for lunch. Then started off again and finally we made it to the top.
Well, I think now you can imagine how I felt. I was on top of the world. It was my both hardest and most satisfying trek I had ever done till them. But the view from top was breathtaking. There were endless mountain ranges. We relaxed there for a while. Srini's brother had some kind of device which had both torch and radio. He turned on the radio and there were more malayam channels than kannada. Then we realized, Kerala is just 15 kms away from there. We were all most in kerala border. Then we started searching for our camping site. Before we decide upon our camping site, we realised we did emptied all our water bottles.
Well, obviously we will all be dead with out water that day and there was no sight of any stream around.
Then we remembered there was a stream of water around half a kilometer down from the top of the peak. So we decided to camp there instead. We trekked down and we all rushed to the stream and satisfied our thirst by drinking buckets of water. Then, the hardest part, pitching the tent. Considering no one in our group had done this before even once, it was kinda experience. Some
how we got both of our tent pitched. Then we opened the food bags we had got, realized 3/4th were spoiled! Only one that was left out was plain rice. Well, I had never eaten just plain rice, but hard times calls for desperate actions. We started eating just plain rice and the way we ate, it looked we were starving for days. Any way, after the dinner, we started of camp fire. Diesel we had carried came handy here in lighing of the wood (or "darle"
). Sandeep was drunk and didt know what he was talking. By the way it was day after new moon day, so the night was dark but when we looked at the sky, then I realized there were so many stars out there. Believe me, you will never see such a clear night sky in bangalore. After a looooong chat in front of camp fire, we went to sleep. As usual I picked my spot first. As the sleep was setting in me, suddenly we heard some one walking around our tent. It sounded spooky. We were thinking it was some one from other tent who had come to steal the bread that we had kept for tomorrows break fast. But
actually it was some one who had come for trekking and had lost is partner. Seemed like he was a local guy. But any way, we never saw his face and he never saw ours. I went back to sleep after that and next thing I remember was waking up next day morning. The sun was all set to rise and we all had our cameras out ready to capture a picture perfect sun rise. After this, we refreshed oursleves, had cup of milk and then started closing down the camp. It was quite a trek. As it was first time for every on camping over night, we all had different experience. Then we started trekking way down. Again as usual donald was no where to be seen and there was some traces of dust. Any way, we all trekked down expecting the vehicle to be waiting for us to take us back to the home stay. But it was no where to be seen, and we ended up waiting more than 1 hour and finally vehicle arrived. We all boarded that and started moving towards our home stay. During our way back, nothing was in my mind except the experience we had the previous day.
It was one the satisfying teak I had and I had ticked Tadiyandamol in the TODO list of treks I am planning to do.
