We (me, rakhee, bless, joce and reghu) were planning such a trip for a while. As me and reghu were in Chennai, and bless and joce in Bangalore, reghu quickly came out with a location midway. He In fact suggested a temple but nobody was interested and then we settled for Yelagiri. A hill station just 3 hrs from Bangalore (from Chennai too.). I decided to come to Bangalore on the previous day and wanted to go Yelagiri in bless's car. As expected reghu got stuck with some stuff like "rocket design" and told us to proceed with our plan and declared that he would be joining. All done and we started late and reached Yelagiri in the night and started looking for a place to stay. Fortunately we found a decent place. Then we sat down and planned for a trek next day and we got the trekking route from the resort owner (not to mention, he was a keralite). While all were watching TV, in the hall Reghu called up and said he will be reching Yelagiri next day before our breakfast.
Woke up early and we started our first trek at 6 in the morning. It was pretty cold in the morning but the route was inviting. It was an experience, birds chirping all around us and I was trying hard to get a good snap in bad light with little success. Soon I gave up and started taking pictures each other. 2 km up and we all got tired we settled on a big rock overlooking the valley.
It was wonderful to be quiet and seeing the lush green forest everywhere. However the hunger started dampening our spirit slowly. We all felt sorry for not carrying our breakfast. We decided to abort the 5 km trek. We started climbing down back giving way to some local people leading their cattle and carrying fire woods.
We saw a large number of silhouetted birds in big tree. As that tree itself was out of reach of my camera and because of the pressure of ever growing hunger, we did not give it a try.
Soon we are back in our hotel and started out in search of a hotel. We end up in a small restaurant attached to a small house. We ate the best idlis and parippu vadas of our life time. Once we finshed our breakfast, we were ready for another trek through Eucalyptus platation. Just before entering the trail we heard a loud buzzing sound and all looked above to see this magnificent tree full of honey hives. It seemed peculiar to me that the bees preferred that particular tree for making their home. None of the other trees, even those which were standing pretty close, attracted the bees..
Here I shot the Indian Robin, that perched on a fallen bamboo near the trail. We lost interest as we were unable to experinece anything interesting in a typical plantation and returned back to the "base camp".
The next plan was to try rowing in a small artificial lake. It seemed very easy as young children row the boats at a decent speed across the lake. I decided to try, however soon I realised it's not that easy to get the rhythm. I found very difficult to control both paddles simultaneously. It was clumsy sometimes I put the paddle too deep to realise its difficult to pull, in next stroke I just skimmed the water. I seemed myself as Kostya Bogomolov, struggling in the river Dnieper. Everyone tried in turn and Blessen did it even without the paddle. (will be getting that video soon). Rakhee claimed herself as the best among us, it's anyway still in dispute.
We came back in our resort and had a heavy lunch and slept for an hour. In the evening while driving back to Bangalore, we received a text message from Reghu that read " Sorry guys I'm cancelling the plan".
No comments:
Post a Comment