Road Trip To Kolli Hills !

My fren shrinidhi hande, a avid blogger and business analyst at accenture, posted on his facebook wall regarding a roadtrip to kolli hills which is 30 kms away from salem. He does road trips once in two months. I wanted to do something new, and immediately I replied him to “count me in”. He then emailed me the details of the trip and told me the expected expenses.We had planned the road trip, on December 18^th 2010, leaving at 10 pm. Shrinidhi asked me to wait outside F5ive technologies at virugambakkam. He was returning back from another road trip with another group of people and dropped them outside F5ive technologies after that he picked me up from their. We had to pick up two more people on the way, Dhruv and harishankar.

We started getting introduced to each other. Myself and dhruv were sitting at the back seat, shrinidhi was driving and harishankar was taking turns to drive. Myself and dhruv were discussing on various topics. I shared the activities which I am involved in. We Were observing the highway, and we all discussed about politics, highway revenue per day, funny billboards on the highway. We kept admiring the full moon and tried to take pictures without stopping the car, but never succeeded. We kept staring at the road, without sleeping most of the time. At times we took turns to sleep, while hari and shrinidhi took turns to drive. We stopped at a tea shop around 3 AM early morning and had some tea, and continued our road trip non stop.

We reached salem at 6 Am. We parked our car at a place specified by Praveen, the next participant to join our team. Praveen owns a business “auxil solutions” at salem. He arrived to the place specified by him, and towed us to his residence. He was kind enough to offer us his place to fresh ourselves and his mom served us some hot tea. After refreshing, myself, shrinidhi, Praveen and his brother, dhruv and hari started off for kolli hills, which is around 30 kms from salem town and has 70 hair pin bends.

I’d expected the top of Kolli hills to have a fairly smaller surface area, but it turned out to be large enough, similar to Yercaud. Various tourist destinations are spread in different directions. We went direct to a place which looked like town (with a bus stop and few small hotels, where we had breakfast, at an economic cost of Rs 138 for 6 people).

Then went back to the main temple called Arapaleeshwarar Temple, several kms away. The Arapaleeshwarar Temple is fairly small and typical of any other temples. Photography is banned here and it is believed that this god has some wired powers-of destroying photographs taken by devotees. The inside of the temple is fairly dark, as in any temples and no quality photo can be taken without using flash. Anyways, if the god can ensure that no one can take photos, then why ban it? People can be allowed to try their luck, since god would anyway delete those pics. Anyways didn’t find this temple and its photo ban powers worth worrying about.

Two waterfalls exist near the temple. The main one is far and one needs to climb down several hundred steps to reach there. We didn’t have time for this one and had to skip. The other one was a smaller water fall, shown here

Other tourist attractions on Kolli Hills are a viewpoint, another waterfalls (which looks great from a distance, full view won’t be visible once you go near), a small natural lake with boating and a Shiva temple (though boat ride was priced at 15 Rs for 20 mins, we found all boats unoccupied- either the service was not there or no one preferred the boat ride.

Another destination was Pot Burial-a different kind of cremation ground. An entrance which called itself Botanical Garden was closed and when Dhruv peeked inside, he found nothing exciting. We stopped to buy jackfruits, honey and other fruits at the bus stand and commenced our return journey.

A resort called Nallathambi Resort exists on top of Kolli hills, but this is a small building with few rooms and not really a resort. They didn’t even have a restaurant to serve food. Wildorchidcamp, which provides Swiss tents, seems to be another option to stay there, but I didn’t notice any signboards pointing us to this place. Not sure where it is located. Salem will be the nearest town for luxury hotel rooms.

My next trip has been planned to colombo and will be sharing my experiences here.

cheers !

RAIDERZ OF THE WATER WORLD !

Finally I am blogging about my hiking experience with Chennai trekking club with Chennai trekking club organized by the A team on September 25, 26 and 27 of 2010. The A-team members are Ansar ahamed, Rajinikandh and Manoj Kumar Natrajan. This trip Officially made me one of the members of the CTC.

Day Zero. Friday Night – Leave Chennai

We all assembled at Chennai central railway station, in front of Hotel saravan bhavan. Myself, vignesh, anand dorapalli, deepak, prassanth and praveen arrived early and started getting to know each other. Then rest of the members started joining. we were asked to fill out a form for personal details. The train started off around 3.30 pm.

We all had good fun during the journey, few were playing cards, some were playing "Mafia" lead by sunita dugar- "he mafia queen", and few were chit chatting. However the ultimate goal was to kill time somehow during the journey to bangalore.

We reached bangalore, within few hours and further had to travel to shimoga. Before that we had to have a our dinner. so a group of people decided to go out and get dinner for everyone. We had idly and chapati for dinner, sitting on the platform of the railway station. By the time bangalore members too joined in. We immediatly, moved to the train which was departing for shimoga. It was a 5 and 1/2 hours travel, so everyone grabbed their seats and went early to bed, since we had a big day coming up next.

Day One. (At Sharavati)

We reached shimoga early morning, and we had a bus arranged already by CTC. We quickly got in, and settled ourselves. We were headed to sharavati, water sports was waiting for us. Our bus had to drive through the forest to reach our destination. The forest slopes too inclined and the pathway was totally affected due to rain. So we had to leave the bus after a certain distance and started walking. We reached the base camp, where we kept our backpacks and got ourselves freshed.

First we were given certain set of rules before jumping into the water, or doing any kayaking or rafting. The magic word was "dont panic". lol! We were provided with life jackets before going into the water. This was great advantage even for people who never knew to swim. We had fun swimming for a while. Then came the surprise, we wer allowed to do rafting, kayaking. We took turns to use the kayaks. It was real fun.

After all the rafting and kayaking activities, it was time to have some lunch. We had sambar rice with Papad. Most of us immersed half of our body in the water and ate our lunch, which was a new experience. We never had the feeling of looking at our watch for knowing the time, but it was evening very quick. Manoj organized a kayak race. We were two groups, comprised of three people in each group. I was also involved in this activity. I enjoyed the race completely, but i was unable to win.

Time for campfire. Ansar came forward and introduced himself to all the new members of CTC. He asked one by one to come out and introduce each other and say something unique. Each one took turns to introduce themselves. After that we played antakshari, which was real fun, where every started dancing and singing.

Day two.

Most of us got up very early. We had the opportunity of looking at the sun rise and take some beautiful pictures. Few swam on the lake. Then we were served hot breakfast. Today's agenda was trekking. We had to go to another destination to start our trek. So we were all dumped in a truck, which was used for cows. Though it was a thrill ride, it was a bad idea to do so. The truck was stinking and most of us were sweating really bad, that increased the bad smell. We reached the destination and we were asked to apply sniff powders on our feet, to avoid leeches. But it was of no use. During the trek we had to cross many streams, which washed away our sniff powders off our feet.

I thought leeches were to scary and would bite us to death. But we didn't have the feeling that they got on our legs. They are blood suckers and grow bigger and bigger, sucking our blood. We wer asked to keep walking, to avoid leeches getting stuck to our legs.

We had walked through dangerous paths, to reach the twin falls. The falls was awesome. Cant believe the nature. Falls somewhere into dense forests. WOW! We took bath in the falls and got rid of the leeched stuck in our legs and foot. We then walked back the same way which we came, for our lunch. Biriyani for lunch. :D

We returned to base camp by 9pm and had our dinner. We then quickly went to bed, and were allowed to sleep only for 2 hours, since we had to start for our next destination. We woke up at 12 in the midnight and started off for a 4*4 jeep ride. We all were sleepy, and the jeep ride kind of woke me up and i completely enjoyed the ride. It was 6 hours drive to reach sita nadi. The driver kept talking to me all his life long experiences, which he had gone through driving in the forestry area.

Day three.
We reached Sita Nadi at 6 AM in the morning. Our group reached first and we got the first opportunity for our next activity "White water rafting". We got into our life jackets and got ready for posing for the camera's. Though it was white water rafting, the water was really friendly. It was not the season for water to be wild. Whatever! We enjoyed rafting.

This was a memorable adventure trip with the A team and I still cherish the best moments, like playing cards in the train (P.S: though i never knew to play :P), having lunch by immersing half the body in the lake, best kayak experiences, white river rafting and a lot of fun fun fun.

Finally Blogging

I always wanted to write and keep a diary of my experiences and day to day activities so that I could show them to my kids and inspire them and make them understand there were difficult times and there were good times too. But recording my day to day activities was not a possible thing for me, since I never got the time. Now I have started blogging and I am getting motivated in many ways by looking at people around me who also blog and how well they prioritize their time. I personally feel that everyone of us should prioritize our life, so that we get to involve in everything around us. Blogging is a nice way to throw all our feelings and thoughts into writing. The present generation has developed more in social networking like twitter, facebook and blogging, we need to equally keep us connected with all that which everyone does in order to present ourselves as a unique personality. So to all my frens out there happy blogging.

Cheers !