A Date With The Adventure
Most organs work little longer even after heart gets struck, likewise I too will get updates on football team. Curiosity for knowing the careful brother’s attempt for a place in insti team yielded disappointment, to my annoyance I get to see arul’s name in the final team list. Who is a gold medalist in athletics, shifting profile for a B-team position, but he is a very good footballer. I buzzed him to empathize on his role shifting decision. Arul said for his 4 fun visits to the field, coach was overwhelmed with his talent. In conversation I made fun about his weekend get-away’s (he does that almost every weekend complete outlander). He asked me if I can join for trip very next morning at 4.30, it’s almost half past 11 on Friday night, He assured it will be adventurous, one day trek and only 4 including me. Slightly inclined I enquired more, to my surprise one of other two is coming from b’lore and works at SAP. Unknowingly without any more resistance, I said yes, count me in.
Early in the morning looking at arul’s backpack I was absolutely confused (me with empty hands). He is fully geared up along with cooking utensils too. Very soon we both reached Chennai central, introductions with the other two, booking tickets in a general compartment and boarding the train in no time still left us standing. First one hour is rough and aching. I sat on arul’s backpack and others too settled quite ok. Soon we got little comfortable. Arul opened his backpack and took out a map of YELAGIRI hill station (this map is actually a classified info), and started making the trekking plan. All I can figure out from the map is contours and the elevations marked. Arul has done some professional training in mountain climbing before his graduation and has been adventurous, you name a place in south India and he has visited that. His friend from b’lore is his college friend and partner in almost every college day treks; I was totally baffled listening to the two pros talking fluently in technical slang and their college day memories, and my part is giving them company, asking some silly questions and trying to break a joke in between.
After a while arul started explaining his purpose of the visit. To my understanding it goes like this, Arul and some of his associates are planning to bring adventure tourism into a consumer model (yes those are the words Adventure tourism). As part of that they need to identity some sweet spots all over south India, build up a working system, network these places and conduct trips at low cost. They registered a company one year back and since then they placed the plans in working stance and operating with only few known places in Tamilnadu and working hard to create a more sophisticated system. Fourth guy works for this company, I guess. Our target is simple look at the present facilities available around, explore the terrain and estimate the feasibility for reaching peaks.
As things getting clearer as time passes by, I’m having a completely different day after a long time. Exactly after 2 years I’m traveling again in train other than a local train. As the disturbing thoughts started drifting me away soon our train journey came to an end and we were near the base of the hill station. We finished our breakfast and got our lunch parceled along with few water bottles. We traveled by bus to the top of the hill station, journey was awesome, loop after loop taking sharp turns, distance is just 15kms but it took more than an hour to reach the top. From there we hired an auto that took us close enough to the entrance for Mangalam reserve forest.
Out of the three peaks which arul identified in map and want to experience, one is at 1340mts and other two somewhere around 1200mts. Btw Arul’s watch shows altitude and directions too, currently reads 900mts. 1340mts peak is a usual trek with well laid path by the locals and a temple on top of it. Fortunately this is not first time for arul to this place. We got everything that’s necessary to explore in the wild, so we started making our own path in the wild. Though it was little sunny, Climate was good with cool breezes. Terrain is very difficult to explore as it is completely covered with bushes and tall trees it’s even hard to see which side is peak except with the compass. We didn’t encounter much problem except at once, which is a true challenge for every explorer; finally we managed to find rain water grooves in the bushes to move further by crawling. Taking a break here and there, climbing plain rock surfaces to 4 meter tall bushes, plane surfaces to 60 degrees rock faces, we finally reached to the peak without using much of the gear except ropes. As soon as we reached the peak most excellent thing is the confused look on the other visitor’s faces. It took almost three hours to reach that place. Sight seeing; standing above the clouds trying to look human life on the ground… through the clouds… is always a fascinating view.
Almost half the adventure is done and we all are pretty tired, still we want to do some mountain climbing, and second quest can fulfill that, as we can see from the map there is drastic change in altitude of some 100mts. And to arul’s knowledge it will be a bare rock with out any vegetation. To reach that place we need to descend some 300mts and again climb up to reach this spot. This is totally painful job as it was never explored it is covered with thick vegetation. We are struck almost every 10mts and need to use ropes and climb rock by rock or crawl through the bushes in order to move further. Very tiring and needs lot of strength. It is already 4.30pm by that time we are at 1100mts altitude, still no sight of this mountain front. Climate is getting colder and colder. Though we have torches still it will be tough to reach the other peak. So we dropped our adventure in between and started heading back. To get back fast we need to first find out the well laid path and travel back. We traveled almost one km to reach this path and from there it felt like blessed to walk normally again.
By 6.00pm we are back at the place where we got down from the auto. We called the same auto guy to pick us back. The auto came as soon as soon as we reach that place and took us to the bus station. From there we traveled on an open top mini lorry to reach the base of hill station (sun is setting and awesome view all the way). We boarded a direct bus to Chennai. As arul needs to go to cochin for some other work he came with us till vellore. At vellore we got some time to get down and recharge ourselves. We three parted at guindy and I’m back safe at campus by 12 in the night.
