Tadiandamol [31-Dec-2005 to 01-Jan-2006]
Tadiandamol [31-Dec-2005 to 01-Jan-2006] |
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[Tadiandamol 2005]
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Dates : 31-Dec-2005 and 01-Jan-2006 Location : Tadiandamol, Coorg |
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This is an absolute non-sense of a decision by the Karnataka goverment - "Not to allow *ANY* trekkers to climb Kudremukha, Kumaraparvatha and many others". Kudremukha is out of the bounds due to so-called naxal problem. But, not allowing trekkers is certainly not the solution. I can not help screaming this Dilbert punch line "You are solving the wrong problem!!!" in my mind. Kumaraparvatha is a different story. It was raining heavily in Bangalore and that is where the forest department HQ is situated. Until "further notice" no trekkers are allowed since it is dangerous to trek in rain. Agreed. But it stopped raining at KP long long ago. Just over a month ago, it stopped raining in Bangalore also. So much for the 'babu-ism' prevalent in public offices. No wonder people will resort to non-legal means to get what is rightfully theirs.
Left with no other option, we had to go to that one place where the access is not yet restricted - even though it meant going back to Tadiandmol, almost exactly a year later. This time, due to the increased level of average boredom among engineers, there were more people - 10 in all. I had never before got groceries for 10 people for 2 days. But I thought simple extrapolation must work. |
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We had to skip the breakfast (at "Blue Bell" hotel) this time. The 6:45 bus was just leaving. Once we reached the Kakkabe, we needed a place to eat. The fist and the only place to eat is Coffee Country. I sincerely suggest you to avoid it - which means, finish your breakfast necessarily at the Blue Bell hotel. The service is slow - dead slow (we waited for an hour). It is damn expensive (Bangalore like rates in that village - unacceptable). The coffee country guy charged us Rs222/- for 4 slices of bread and a cup of tea each/- In comparison, even 2 plates of Kharabath, 1 plate of Shira and one cup tea each would only cost us about Rs150/- at the Blue Bell.
Rest of the trek went exactly like the previous time... exactly - until we came to the fork where we can see the peak for the first time. Obviously, we took the right path this time and continued for another hour or so with out any events. We camped for lunch at the stream. It was here, that I realized that my extrapolation of the food supply had gone slightly wrong (to the negative side, of course). We had finished that day's lunch and half of the next day's breakfast 9. After an hour of rest, we had to proceed. Absolute lack of challenge in the terrain so far made Kalli, the "pahadi" suggest that we take the line of sight ascent to the peak rather than the round about not-so-steep route. It was approved 9-1. Ashish being the only sane one among us (as we found out later). |
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The line of sight climb seemed easy at first. It got tougher and tougher when there was a huge rock that we had to climb. After we got past that rock, there was another - and another... finally we came to a point we could all sync-up and re-evaluate our options. Burlesh had by this time climbed to the farthest point possible - there was a deep valley that was separating us and the Tadiandamol peak. Obviously there is definitely a reason why people go round about to the peak. |
| RED - wrong BLUE - correct | |
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Luckily, we heard a group of people making merry inside the woods. After enquiry, we found that they were not climbing the peak and were just having a family outing. Contrary to popular belief, this is the last point where we have access to water - not eh stream where we had lunch. That sucks for two reasons. First, we carried 2+ lts of water in a vessel for over half an hour and climbing the toughest terrain of the day. Second, it's always a bad feeling when we realize that there was a point of human interception upstream.
Here we met a person who claimed to be an erstwhile (or off-duty, I don't recall which) forest guard. He said, that the forest department is planning to have a check post at the stream below and disallow people to spend night at the top (at least in summer). Forest fires were of great concern to him. Fair enough. Not every body take care to extinguish fire completely... I mean COMPLETELY by pouting water over it. Quite often, trekkers assume the fire to be out as soon as they stop seeing the flames. Strong winds can cause the red hot coal to burst back into flames. We definitely need to take care of that in summer. In winter, thankfully, the overnight dew does it for us. |
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| We were back on the track after filling our water containers to the brim once again. Again, there was no excitement till the top. We reached the peak this time by 2:00PM. A huge group of people were there... a big let down. On the brighter side, half of them were girls. Half of them were really good looking. There were just too may people this time. Not all were of the decent kind too. As time passed, group by group, people started leaving. Once we had some space of ourselves, we had Sweet Corn Soup - again reminding me of my error in judgment regarding food. By sunset, we even had dinner a combo of bisi-bele-bath, pulav and pongal. |  |
| The body Bags | |
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Now came the hard part. How do we get though the night with just sleeping bags? There were only 2 other groups. One of them did not seem to be friendly enough. The friendlier people were not good. I was irked by their eco-unfriendliness. At one point, I had to tell them to take their plastic waste back to the city. I personally do not like littering such jungles with paper... even though it is bio-degradable. But who knows how many chemicals are used in making that paper. Paper plates usually come with a think coating of plastic/wax, but pseudo naturalists wrongly classify them bio-degradable to keep their conscience clear. The best policy is to take back everything that you have brought into the jungle.
So, we all settled in our respective sleeping bags and pretended to sleep. Wow. That was view worth climbing 10 mountains. I know theoretically that there are billions of stars. But seeing all of them is totally a different thing. Too bad, none of us had a camera that can capture the night sky on film. We saw a couple of shooting stars in just a span of 30 minutes. By 7:30 the sun was well down and wind had picked up. The sleeping bags now seemed to be really inadequate to cope up with the chill factor. Over the next few hours, wind just kept getting stronger and the gusts more frequent. All of wished one another a very happy new year, 2006. We now were just wishing the night was over... I remember that I kept asking Ashish the time every 10 minutes or so until midnight... Later I must have fallen asleep, thank God for that. |
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| Out of the world. | |
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At six in the morning, I woke up. Could not feel my feet, or fingers... I ran up and down to see if I could see the same colorful sunrise as last time. This time it was better. The sky above us was clear and we could see the sun rise very clearly. At the same time, we could see a sea of clouds beneath us in the valleys on all 4 sides of the peak. No camera in the world can do enough justice to what we were seeing.
We had a tough time lighting fire again. I just remembered that a guy had specifically told us to keep some firewood dry (away from the dew) for the morning. I thought he was just asking us to keep fire wood apart for the morning. It is also very important to keep them dry by covering it. Well, rest of the trip was down hill from there - walking down into the valleys filled with clouds... it was not until we reached the stream that the first rays of sunlight started warming us. |
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| Getting down | |