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Landed in Bangalore last Monday evening. 11 days of long vacation at my native place. I guess a bit rare in IT services industry. 65 unread mails in the client mailbox and 150+ in the official one. Had to clean em up. No excuses. Laziness is evil! Hard work for three days. Today sick leave just don’t wanna go to office. Or may be just to post this. Ate home cooked food and prasad from Iscon temple almost like a pig. Went to college on a holiday; Just to recollect where we used to sit and what we used to do.. Sikhar Chandi.. A small trip down the memory lane. Met some old friends. Clicked a lot of snaps. Brought sweets to the “no sweet” land. Mission accomplished.
Snaps : wwww.flickr.com/photos/vegdevil
After a long depressing period of 9 months, I’m going home again. 12th July is the day that I’m waiting for. For 11 day I’ll be eating home cooked food and lots of sweet, which seems to virtually non-exsistent in the South. And the sweet that can be found here, is next to impossible to eat. Rasgoollas almost feel like rubber here. Gulab Jamoon stinks. They just have the names. Now going for the real taste for few days. Ohh, Shit this is again some kind of a travel blog!!
As usual Air Deccan has fucked up. My flights just got rescheduled from morning 7.30 AM to evening 8.35 PM. Can you beleive it. But this happens only in India. So next time if ever, no more Air Deccan. Bastards!! I’m not a big homesick fellow. But anyway the thought of going home is somehow keeping me in a good mood. Not caring about office work anymore. In just couple of days I’ll turn on my ugly “Out of Office assistant” in Outlook. That’d be the happiest momment. No more worries about the goddamned mails from the clients. At least for 11 days.
I wasn’t posting anythign untill today. But as I’ll have to start preaparing for the trip ahead, I’ve just posted two posts below; which I should have posted long time back. Hehehe… Anyway again blogging after a long time. Feels good!! Hope I’ll blog on time in the coming days..
Gosh!! My blog is almost becoming a travel blog. This is my third continuous post wherein I’m blogging about some sort of travel again. I think I should use some specialized travel blog site, instead of WordPress. Wot say guys?
Now coming straight down to the point, Let me tell you, KP stands for Kumar Parvat, the highest peak in Karnataka, in the Western Ghats. Just wanted some kind of trek before the monsoon sets in. This time three relatively inexperienced trekkers, including me, started planning for the KP trek. We’d no idea about the weather condition there. As usual Chirag started collecting all possible information, including stuffs about leeches. From the beginning itself we started having lots of issues. We didn’t have raincoats. Just had enough food for and sports drink and one jacket each.
Our plan was something like this. We’d travel from Bangalore to a place called “Gundya” which is on the way to Mangalore. From Gundya we’d planned to take a bus to Kukke from where the trail of the trek starts. We stuck to our plan. Had a tough time finding a bus from Bangalore to Gundya. The ones we found were already packed, as it was a Friday night. Finally found a private bus. A congested one and not so comfortable one. 380 Km journey. No push back seats. Nothing! Reached gundya 6.00 AM in next morning. Saturday. It was raining there and we’re fucked up. Gundya is nothing but a small place with one police check post and two shops. We discovered that we’re even more fucked up, when we started asking around for direction to Kukke. The road that connected Gundya to Kukke was closed for some kind of construction work. No heavy vehicles were allowed except for auto rickshaws. Found an auto rickshaw almost at around 8.00 AM, who agreed to take us to Kukke 22 KMs from there for a sum of 300 bucks. We reached the place we wanted to. Small, clean and nice village. The famous Kukke Subramanium Swamy temple is there. Hard to believe but food is free there. We’d breakfast at a nice looking restaurant there. Finished our chores. Rahul and Chirag went ahead to visit the Subranium Swamy temple. Being an atheist to the core, waited for them outside the temple.
We started our trek at 9.00 AM. The rain had stopped, but it was muddy all around. We could see the majestic Kumar Parvet from the village street. Lush green dense forest from the bottom to the top. On the top, it looked like some kind of golf course. We couldn’t stop ourselves. Clicked pictures like maniacs. Now it was time for us to get started on our mission. We walked almost more than 2 KMs on a muddy track to reach the trail. The entrance to the trail looked scary. It was dense forest, drenched with rainwater. The trail was looking muddy. We could found something written on a board there in Kannada, which of course non of us could read; later found out that it was warning for bears inside the forest from two other guys from Hyderabad. We started trekking. We found scorpions of virtually all colors. After a while we started spotting leeches. By the time we’d already trekked 1.5 KMs we started to find more and more leeches. I also noticed some crawling up my shoe. We stopped immediately and wound scotch tapes over the bottom of our pants. But nothing could stop the leeches. Fucking blood suckerz. After walking a bit more into the woods I could feel those ugly fucking creatures entering my skin. And I was correct actually. I found almost 7 to 10 leeches on each of my feet. Same was the case with Rahul and Chirag. We started removing them. But, by the time we could remove one; two more were crawling up on us. The situation was completely uncontrollable. The decision of abandoning the trek had to be taken. Finally I gave up and told them that I was going back. They’re bit shocked but started climbing down with me as they also didn’t have much choice. It’d also started raining by then. We just rushed down the hill collecting even more leeches. We reached the bottom; the only thing that was there on all of our minds was to remove those blood suckerz. We almost got naked under a tree. A couple of leeches were entering my skin making a hole in my socks. The rest were just crawling on my socks and shoes. It was a horrible condition. All of us were busy removing them. After we’re done we came back to the village to book a guesthouse and our return ticket to Bangalore on the same day. Actually we’d received wrong information about the place. We’re told that it would be almost barren land till 30% to the top. We’re also told that there would be no leeches till the peak of monsoon. But what we saw was completely the opposite. We’d just increased the attrition rate of that particular trek, but were happy that we didn’t have any more leeches. Fuck man!! I’d a long shower in the bathroom while Rahul was busy cleaning his wounds from the leeches. He was bleeding profusely but somehow the bleeding stopped after some time. We’d our MTR packets and bread for lunch.
We still had the entire afternoon and evening to spend there. We started off to see the river Kumardhara. Not a very famous river. Not worth visiting, but had nothing much to do. Chirag was almost stoned and started dancing in the river. Had good time there. Shot some videos and snaps of him doing all sorts of crazy things. Came back into the village. Strolled along the streets. Clicked some snaps, which are being listed by some of the most interesting snaps from KP by Flickr. Feels good to hear it. Hahahehehehee.. Checked out some of the shops around, but found nothing worthy of buying. It was drizzling a bit. Had evening snacks cum dinner. Went back into the hotel room. Got freshen up a bit and started packing things up. Had to catch the bus at 9.00 PM in the night. Checked out from the Hotel at 8.15 PM. Reached bus stop. It was still drizzling and I could still feel those leeches crawling up my skin!! Not a very good experience indeed. The bus started cruising through dense forest. All three of us slept off. When we woke up it was 6.00 AM, Sunday, in Bangalore. Got back home, safely!!
Snaps : http://www.flickr.com/photos/vegdevil/tags/kumarparvat/
This hapened in the month of May. May 25th – 27th 07 to be exact. More than one year in Bangalore, but was yet to visit one of the most famous places in Karnataka. Found 3 more willing souls. One Hired Indicab, with a known driver. One HP camera with very less battery life and two cell phone cameras. That was all we’d to capture some memories. But the only thing that materred then was to see those places.
The most adventurous time we’d was in the Bandipore national park; the dense forest on the way to Ooty. We saw almost every wild animals except elephant. Herds of Deers, Bisons, Hares, a wild Boar and finally, believe it or not, a Tiger. The hair-pin bends were scary. Soon after reaching Ooty we discovered that it was almost chilling over there inspite of the fact that it was peak of summer. And the hotels were damn expensive. Somehow we manged to find a place for our heads for 800 bucks a night. We checked in. The room was dirty and damp. But we’d nothing much to do in there. Had our breakfast and a couple of shots. Headed to St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Went in and clicked some snaps. The second to visit was the boating lake. Dirty water but still Chirag and Sanyasi decided to go in. Pawan and I just walked around and out of sheer boredom had our lunch in a newly opened Panjabi dhaba opposite to the lake. It was time for the 3rd place. Rose garden and the annual flower festival. The flower festival is held ones in every one year and goes on for one week. We’re lucku enough to visit it during the right time but got unlucky because of the rain. But still had a glance quickly. Botanical garden was the 4th place in our list. Its almost a small forest; but beautiful place to spend your afternoon at. Then came the last but the most woderful thing in our list of places to visit. Dodabetta Peak. Its the highest peak in South India if i remember correctly. My Hutch phone was still showing strong signals. I called up my Mom just to see if it was working!! LOL.. Views from the peak was awesome. See the snaps for your satisfaction. While coming down visited the highest elevated tea factory in India. or at least the board there says so! A small one actually. Came back to our small and cheap hotel room. Sanyasi stay in; we three headed out to have a walk along the narrow and busy streets of Ooty. Many antiques and jwellary shops. Clicked some snaps secretly inspite of being warned against it! Had a nice Gujju meal for dinner. Done for the day, tired and soar muscles; the fairy of sleep blessed us with her wand.
Next day! Sunday morning. 6.00 AM. I could feel as if it was kind of typical December morning in my native place; Bhubaneswar. Checked out from the Hotel. Headed for Coonoor. Coonoor is nice place. The toy train looks amazing from a distance. We started off with a very good South Indian breakfast. The tea gardens were beautifully green. They were refreshing to look at. Thought I hate tea, I ended up tasting four different verieties of tea. Finally bought 1.5 KG of three different packet for home, worth Rs. 500!! Phew!! Second place in our list was SIMS park. Just a park, nothign much to see inside. I’d recommend not to waste time visiting it. The no. 3, Lambs Rock is the most amazing place in Coonoor. Clicked many snaps of the landscapes visible from it. Did a small trek there, but on a beautfully paved way. had to visit Mysore. Headed backwards. Visited a South Indian temple on the way to Mysore, on the bank of the controversial river Cauvery.
Reached Mysore at almost 5.30 PM. Didn’t have much choices. Everything in Mysore almost clsoing for the day. Started off with the mysore place. Closed for the day. Frustration started to rise. Went on to visit the majestic St. Josheph’s Cathedral. People were praying inside to their mighty god. Nice place. Next thing in our mind was the much talked about place; Brundavan Garden and the Musical fountain in there. The worst place that I’ve ever visited. The water was stiking. The musical fountain was nothing but a joke. Infact we thought of using all kind of bad words while bloggin about it. Some one gave us the idea of translating the whole into all the different languages so tha people can know the truth about the Mysore. But somehow I refrained myself from doing it. But trust me, Mysore is not worth all the hype that it gets.
It was time to come back to Bangalore. 10 PM in the night. The cab cruised along the Bangalore – Mysore highway at a speed of 110 KMPH. Had a good dinner at a dhaba on the highway. Reached home 1.00 AM early morning. But will never forget one thing. In those two days whoever we asked the way to some where, we invariably got the same answer; “Straightaaaaaa….” in a jolly South Indian accent. We still joke about it!!
