Trek at Thusharagiri

After Saturday’s long Python talk, we returned to the guest house in the evening and I simply crashed on the bed and had a great sleep.

On Sunday morning, I was woken up by Dilip saying ‘Hey, its 9 am. We have to go trekking!’. In an hour, we were on a jeep travelling 34 km to Thusharagiri. The weather was good, not too hot but with a bit of humidity, after all, this is Kerala. We had a look around the place and saw the boards which said there were 5 waterfalls. The first three were ‘nearby’ and the last 2 were 5 km and very far away. In fact, they are restricted since the area is prone to wild animals. So, we decided to go for only the first three waterfalls.

So, the four of us – Dilip, Praveen, Pradeep and myself started on our ‘walk in the hills’. Praveen had been to Thusharagiri before on a NSS trip and was our official guide for the day. That guy has amazing memory! He knew every turn and even once mentioned that one particular tree had more flowers when he had come last time.

(Update on 2008 Jan 27: Since the demise of Yahoo! Photos, the photos are now available in this Flickr set)

This place was the most unpolluted place I’ve ever been to in my life. I simply loved it!

The noise of water happily flowing was the only sound we could hear. We hardly saw any other instance of humanity (yeah, bad geek joke). The pure fresh air made my lungs tingle. The slippery paths made our walk difficult. Mother Nature in her true beauty made it all worthwhile.

We came across plants and trees of all sorts of species, including a coffee plant. The coffee flowers were beautiful, we plucked and chewed on the coffee seeds… we came across a tiny branch of the tree which was sort of what Tarzan would’ve used to swing from tree to tree. We had our own turn to achieve the same. Needless to say, I was afraid I would pull down the tree, so I didn’t pull too hard :lol: … we saw a jackfruit tree and what we suspected to be a ‘ganja’ tree as well..!

After a few more miles of walking, we came across some beautiful flowers… we were soon at the second waterfall. There were a few other college kids there as well. On the other side, we noticed a snake below… one of us shouted ‘Python Python!’ but Pradeep corrected saying it wasn’t a Python since they don’t have long tails….!

In the midst of nature, totally in the wild, I am so happy that I’m far away from all the pollution, the honking of cars, the traffic of the city…. and suddenly the mobile phone rings! Dilip had a BSNL phone and it actually had network coverage in such a remote place as this. Welcome to a networked India!

By now we were really really tired… we had walked nearly 6-7 km on a tough terrain! It was 3 pm and we were really hungry and in this long and amazing trek, we talked a lot and it was mostly Pradeep and myself talking about life in an IT company and the career. We were trying to give them advice and help them get a perspective of life… I think we ended up scaring them! :twisted: … ok, seriously, we had a good talk about everything… as usual, Pradeep and myself got philosophical at times as well… I blame the breathtaking scenery for that ;)

We finally reached our destination… the other 3 went and just fell on the bench there… I was distracted by the beautiful garden and took a lot of snaps there.

We then got back in the jeep and headed back to the guest house. After an hour of deep sleep, we packed our bags and headed for Calicut… we entered one of the bakeries, tempted by the specialties we practically bought half of the store leaving behind a smiling shopkeeper… we got on the train, bid goodbye to Dilip and Praveen (a big thanks to you two for a great time!), and on the way back, Pradeep, myself and Atul Chitnis had a great conversation and we talked about so much stuff… from Indian politics to open source (of course)…

We reached Bangalore on Monday morning, I had taken the day off from work but I still didn’t stay at home. A very close of friend of mine has come down from Mumbai and we spent the whole day doing lots of things… after 3 amazing non-stop fun days…. how can anyone get back to office and actually work!

Note : See my Yahoo! Photos for the complete set of full-size photos. There are lots of wallpaper-quality stuff in there :cool: