Wayanad Trip – the long awaited one with my friends

It was 21^st  Friday evening, when I cross checked and confirmed everything was fine and ready for one great trip to Wayanad. As usual, we had our own plans and timings well fixed hoping it would happen that way…

On Saturday (22^nd Dec, 2007), early morning, guys from Chennai (Saravanan, Ram Prakash, Sivaraman, Ramesh, Srivathsan) reached Bangalore and along with Purushothaman, Sriram and me, we started our 6 hrs journey to Wayanad. On the way, Vivek and Kula Sekar joined us at Mysore. We had our breakfast at Muddur (via Bangalroe-Mysore SH), famous for Muddur Vada.

Driving in a tempo traveler in the Bandipur wildlife sanctuary (near Kerala-Karnataka border), was a nice experience. We reached the Issacs Regency Hotel, Sulthan Bathery at noon and checked-in. With few suggestions from people there we ended up with a new plan. Soon after lunch at near by hotel, we started to Kuruva Dweep Islands. It was one-and-half hour ride but the place we reach was worth it. But the time we reached there it was already 5 PM and we were refused to go inside some places which were already closed. (We realized we should have come early, around 3-4PM). Anyway we had to convince and strike a ‘deal’ with people taking care of that place to let us in after paying out little money. Few of us stepped in to the stream and we tried to reach the other side of the stream. It was as if there was no ending, we crossed more than 4 such streams. And then we found the ‘actual’ other side of the stream. After taking loads of photos we started back (this time in a raft J). I don’t those photos with me now. I”ll upload once done.

The night of day 1 we spent playing card games, TT and Foosball in the games room. (I guess everyone got addicted to foosball sooner and we were scaring the others out of the game room with our enthusiastic shouting and cheering.) J Vivek promised to take us to place we’ll get kerala special items like appam, etc. we ended up in road-side ‘restaurant’, which was quite good!

 

Day 2 was more fun and tiresome. We started direct to Edakkal Caves after having breakfast at, again, outside restaurant. On the way, we stopped to make a visit to the ruined Jain Temple. (Wayanad has lot of temples ranging from very olden days. But we promptly cleared off all those from our agenda as it was a leisure trip. J But later we ended to a place we had not even thought of. I’ll talk about that later.) Initially we didn’t know how tough the first half of the day would be, without realizing this we started trekking as soon as reached the place. When we are done seeing the caves, we were informed by signs there that it was just the beginning. We glanced at a peak about 500 to 800 mts high from that point and we could see many people struggling their way to the hill top. We were determined and started to climb. It was way too fun and scary all the way to the hill top (though only few of us made to top).

Afternoon we had headed to Soochipara falls which was supposed to be a relaxing place (considering we were already tired). But it turned out it was more fun out there. The water bed was shallow and water was flowing at high speed. We immediately made our way to the mid of the waterfall. We had our time enjoying there.

The night of that day again games and games. Sriram had to break the trip and go to his native since he had some urgent work. Rest of us were partying all time.

 

Day 3 we didn’t have much time, so we planned for only one place – Pookote Lake. We check out at the hotel and had our breakfast at Jubilee restaurant. Pookote Lake is an awesome place with lot of greens. We saw huge spread of tea estates on the way and it made our ride pleasant. We had boat ride and relaxed for awhile. It logically marked our end of tour, but we wanted to see more. After some amount of discussion, we decided to go to Nanjangud Temple (on the way to Mysore) and then if there was still enough time we could visit some place in Mysore.

We stopped at Gundalpet to have our lunch and it was already too much sunny for us. (Throughout our trip, we really wondered why we brought our jerk-ins and sweaters.) We reached the temple around 4 PM but realized that it was an auspicious day and there was huge crowd at the temple. Anyway everyone was very much inclined to close the trip with a visit to the temple, so without any thinking we joined the long queue there (This is how a visit to heritage place got into our trip).

We started to Mysore around 6 PM and bid bye to Vivek and Sekar there and started to Bangalore. The return ride was very smooth and quiet (one of the reason being we all watched movie on our way back). All of us were very much satisfied. This long awaited trip ended as an eventful one for all of us! J

 

Good that Sekar brought his handy cam, we‘ll having a short fun-film on our trip soon ready. And, I haven’t got all the photos collated from everyone. Once that’s done, I’ll send more photos.