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 !