Coorg beckoned me!! - II

16th March 007

The adventure continues where i left at "Coorg Beckoned Me-I"..........

We struggled to wake up early that day even though it was planned earlier. Auto Charlie as promised had sent his friend with the Omni our ‘rath’ for our so called expedition. After having breakfast at Athithi we zoomed off on it. The Omni turned out to be a hi-tech one coming with a dvd player and a display screen. Rakhi bhai who already was complaining of headache couldnot handle the convoluted roads and threw up. But no as they say "Tough times never last but Tough people do", Rakhi being the tough guy he is, recovered soon and we headed towards Dubare Forest.

This forest has an elephant sanctuary and we were told that we could feed the elephants if we reached early. We reached Dubare forest in about an hour, bad roads notwithstanding. Only the Cauvery river flowing through the forest seperated us from the elephants, which qwewon the other bank of the river. We hurried and took a boat to reach the other side. But as luck had it for us, the feeding time for the elephants was already over and we cursed ourselves for starting late. But hey we were fortunate enough to see a mother elephant and its baby. The curator was describing the food habits of the elephant and other details to a foreign couple, we joined them inquisitively. One startling fact we heard was that "the pregnancy period for an average Indian elephant is 20-22 months". That’s a long long time to be in your mother’s woumb. Poor baby, had to wait such along time to see the daylight!

The mother elephant was very friendly and we managed to take some snaps holding its trunk and caressing it, but the baby was wild and Sandeep almost got kicked for disturbing it. Yeah it was the arrogance of youth on youth. We pondered on the idea of taking a ride on the elephant but were put off by the exorbitant price of 100 bucks per head for it.

And yes we were tempted by the sparkling water of Cauvery to plunge into it and have fun. Without waiting a second longer we changed into the swimming clothes and no we did not literally plunge in since under the water it was very rocky. We knew we 'ROCK' but did not want to literally be ‘ROCKING’. The 2 guys who knew swimming well were showing off their skills demonstrating all the different strokes in the book, no straight drive here for the cricket crazies. Venkat(no he was not one of the 2) was lured by Sandeep into deep waters and he almost drowned himself. Luckily we dragged him out and he said he felt it was like a rebirth for him. Later we laughed a lot on this incident and teased him that he was a "Sahasa Baludu", but I am sure he won’t forget it.

Nisarga Dham was our next destination, which is a flora and fauna sanctuary. The whole area was filled with sky rocketing bamboo trees all over the place. These trees were making sounds as though they were going to break off and fall on us. There were also different species of trees with the scientific and the normal names inscribed on them. There were beautifuly created houses on the top of the strong bamboo trees. We disturbed a couple’s privacy by climbing on to a tree house opposite to theirs. And yeah you couldn’t blame us, as there wasn’t any “Don’t disturb” board on their house. A few paces down the road was a deer sanctuary with a huge braided fence separating the animals and the social animals. A small chweet girl caught our attention who was feeding the deers with cucumber pieces and talking to them continuously as though they were her pets. Rakhi bhai captured that in his handycam and we followed the cue by feeding the deers ourselves.

We rushed to the boating area as there was already a crowd gathering there. Each boat there was named after either rivers or Telugu movies, to name a few “Godavari”, “Chatrapathi”! We jumped into the pedalling boats and enjoyed the ride while adding a few snaps to the photo album, We later bargained in vain to buy some momentos from that place.


Hunger then came in the way of our pursuit for spiritual bliss in the so called "Golden Tibetian Temple". Again it was another Hotel Athithi that came to our rescue. 3 of us ordered for Full Meals and two for Mini Meals, but we all ended up having all Full meals. Thank God he didn’t bill us for 4 fulls.


We took off to the "Golden Temple" hoping to see Tibetian monks in the temple who supposedly sacrifice all the worldly pleasures to attain Nirvana. But we were taken aback to see 4 Tibetian students, on the way to the temple, zooming off on Karizmas and Pulsars with coolers on. Here, were the hi-tech monks from Tibet. Just imagine Dalai Llama wearing goggle and zooming off on a Karizma, a la Hritik Roshan. Whoever said that "Monks sell their Ferraris or Pulsars" will have to eat his words.
We finally reached the Golden Temple which is a buddhist monastery and has an education institution adjacent to it. We were wondering why the Tibetians had to find a place around 2000kms away from homeland to setup a temple and a college. There were dormitories for the students ahem the hi tech monks with Karizmas and Pulsars, parked outside their rooms.


The Temple had the typical Chinese architecture with the roofs curving upwards at the ends. The idols inside the temple were of Gautam Buddha and his two disciples. These were really huge and enhousing them was a big meditation hall. We posed in front of the temple posing as if meditating.

We were totaly fatigued after traveling and thoroughly enjoying the whole day. While returning, we listened to melody songs playing in the Omni and what a lullaby that turned out to be as few of us were dozing off to glory. Since we missed the "Raja Seat" the day before, we signed off the day with a visit to it. What a view it was from up there from the edge of the cliff! We envied the Raja of Coorg, as we were told that this was the place where he used to spend his evenings having this beautiful view. Finally we reached our lodge, tired but thorughly satisfied.


As if we had’nt had enough, we decided to go on a shopping spree. So after watching the start of the New Zealand-England match we started our shopping. We bought the bizzarest things, first we went out bargaining for the Eucalyptus oil and other tailams at every shop in sight. Finally we bought them at a shop only to find later that we were cheated :( . Finishing off the shopping with Elaichi and other spices, we had our heart's and stomachs full at Boy's choice as we called it (we wrongly read the Kannada script and the english one of the same name "Choice"). And yeah it turned out to be Boy's(our) choice. We hit the bed and watched the match till each one of us dropped dozing off.

Coorg beckoned me!! - I

15th March 007


I was really pumped up for this trip after 6 weeks of gruelling rounds of interviews and discussions for my IIM selections. I needed to take some time out and was wondering what to do. And then Lo behold there was a tailor made trip for me arranged by our tour manager(actually he is our Cisco ka gyan dad) the great Rakhi bhai which I gleefully jumped onto. My interviews were to be over on 14th and the tour started on 15th, a 4 day exodus to Coorg!

It was 15th and even after my pathetic performance at the IIM C interview I had the expression of a school boy finishing his last exam of his annuals. And now Coorg beckoned me!

I took a train to Mysore in the wee hours from Bangalore to join The Gang – Rakhi(Dandipa), Manoj, Sandeep and Venkat(Narendra was missing), who would have already arrived in Mysore.


Mysore to me came across as a laid back Maharaja attitude-wallah city and hey there were also some chariots ahem tongas waiting for me right in front of the railway station. Instead i took the conventional auto to the bus stop. We took a bus to Madikeri which was about 140 kms from Mysore. Madikeri is a hill town in Coorg district which is the best place to alight at, to cover all the beautiful places in and around Coorg. The bus journey was a roller coaster ride and the worst part of it was that we managed to get a seat only in the last 2 rows of the bus. It was like a motored camel ride to be precise, with our heads kissing the roof everytime the driver decided to go wild. During the journey, we already started comparing it to Ooty and Munnar citing the height above the sea level and the chillness and stuff. While we were chatting on all the topics on earth ranging from college natkhats to politics, Rakhi was busy dozing away to glory, already dreaming of the beautiful trip awaiting us. I jumped onto my digicam and took a snap of him and teased him on this later.

After arriving at Madikeri the quiet and beautiful hill town we managed to drag our heavy luggages to the Chitra lodge. Our researchers Mr. Manoj and Rakhi had come up with huge figures of the hotel rates in Madikeri, but to our surprise the rates were reasonable and this being an off-season helped our cause. All 5 of us managed to squeeze into a single room which was spacious enough, if not luxurious. It was already 3 in the afternoon and there were elephants and not rats running up and down in our stomachs. So first climbed our way up the steep road and rushed to the nearest vegetarian hotel, 'The Athithi'. We had full meals and literally so, munching everything leaving only the plantain leaf to mercy. After a small nap we kick started our adventure trip.

Our tour manager Rakhi bhai slated 2 to 3 places for the evening in Madikeri itself. So we decided to load test any auto coming our way with all 5 of us ready to sandwich into it.And yeah we finally found a volunteer for that, Auto Charlie who risked even the police and agreed to this for a premium, with a rider that at least two of us had to get down twice during the journey in steep places. With Rakhi on the rod and Sandeep learning to drive, taking instructions in Tamil we started to Abbey Falls. We passed through many huge private Coffee estates on the way. For starters, Coffee grows in the shade of the tall trees surrounding it. So if u had visited a Tea estate before and expecting the staircase view here, you will be in for a disappointment but the tall trees surrounding the coffee plants would surely belittle you. We arrived at the Abbey Falls, it actually is a part of a private coffee estate but let open for the public view. As we were already told by Charlie and thankfully so that there was some drainage water mixing in the waterfalls we did not dare to step into the water. Instead we marveled at the sight of the water falls and we shutterbugs in a jiffy started taking snaps of us on the backdrop of the falls. Our personal cinematographer Rakhi bhai(yeah we couldnot afford Rajiv Menon or Ravi K Chandran for this) got his camera rolling as we did our antics.

Luckily on the return we got another auto to fit two of us and we were relieved from walking up the steep roads. I was the spokesperson for our party ahem Gang since I am a Tamilian and to my relief many of the people in Coorg could converse in Tamil. On the way back we struck a deal with Charlie for our adventurours pursuits the next day for a K bucks on an Omni. The driver, a friend of his would come at 8 30 AM and we were already dreading the thought of waking up early for that, mainly Sandeep.

We then set out on foot after successfuly load testing the auto. We visited Omkareshwara temple, a Shiva temple which had a large beautiful tank too. We then went to jail, dont mistake us for commiting any crime there, it was actually the Raja's fort which was now converted into a jail. We then headed towards Raja Seat which we were told had a beautiful bird's eye view from the top of the greenery below. But it was already getting dark and we dropped the plan. Instead we shopped for the needful for that night, we then managed to find a Chat bhandar to relish the cutlet chat and left for the lodge. We enjoyed the evening watching TV, playing cards and other things finishing a whole Sprite bottle besides the drinks. The game of cards ended with a tough battle between me and Rakhi bhai who won it eventually. We went to bed soon since we had to wake up early the next day.

To be cont........ wait for Coorg beckoned me!! - II