I heard from my friends that Bangalore has got lot of hiking groups. Though I joined this group about a year back when I came to Bangalore for the first time, I always waited for some company to go on a trek. This time I decided to go anyway and registered for the trek alone.
The journey started from majestic. A group of 19 of us gathered at majestic bus stop. To my surprise, there were at least 4 people who were doing their trek for the first time like me. The journey started with a movie The Conjuring, it was midnight, a perfect time to play. After travelling for around 6hrs, we stopped our bus about 2km before the base camp. We reached the base camp at around 6:30 AM, where we were greeted by a pair of dogs :P. After finishing with our morning activities, Vinay & Varun prepared lemon tea for us and had our breakfast which we brought along.
We started the trek at around 10:00 AM. By now I got along with few people in the group. It was difficulty to understand Kannada :P. My first friend was Sajal as he also didn't know Kannada. The only kannada sentence which I could confidently use was "Kannada Gothilla" :P. The higher we climbed the view got better and mesmerizing. By the time we reached the top, I knew almost everyone in the group :). We shared the huge supply of eatables we carried with the group and it seemed more like we climbed 1740m just to eat. 
While descending it started drizzling and as I didn't carry my raincoat I just packed all my gadgets in a polythene bag and started enjoying the rain. After reaching down everyone were exhausted, so we just sat there in the cottage relaxing. By evening, again our stomach started demanding for food. The dinner was prepared by the professional cooks :P. They made Pongal, which tasted very good after removing the excess of black peppers :). We put up a camp fire and all the group members gathered to give an small intro about themselves. The group was diversified with all sorts of people:- national badminton and hockey players, students, professionals from different streams, love birds :P. Anusha inspired everyone to watch the kannada movie (I forgot the name) with her awesome description :).
The night was very cold and I didn't have my sleeping bag. I somehow survived the night and decided to buy a sleeping bag before my next trek. Hot tea was served in the morning. We again lit the the campfire to get some warmth as we enjoyed the tea. Followed by Puliogre which was also very good. Never in the past I have had so much of rice, as I mostly eat Chapathis. 
We packed our bags and left for Chelavara falls which was "cherry on the ice cream". Water was very cold but it didn't stop us from enjoying a dip in it. After that i was dead tired. I just wanted to eat and sleep. We went to madikeri to kill some time as we didn't want to reach Bangalore at odd time. We again started eating there. This time it was curd rice. Apart from that we had cold drinks, snacks etc. On our way back to Bangalore, we stopped for dinner. We sang some Hindi/kannada songs in un-bearable voices :P. We reached Bangalore at 5AM. In these 40hrs I met so many people, had so many first time experiences, had authentic South Indian food, learnt few kannada words, had leech bites, saw coffee/cardamom estates and the list goes on. 
It was a really nice experience and now planning to attend one such trek each month. Special thanks to Vinay for organizing the trek.
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Written by: Vivek v Velankar
Date: Sep 28th & 29th
Date: Sep 28th & 29th
Composed by: Sana
Event organized by: Vinay
Image Gallery: Rajesh, Varun, Bhavana, Shiva Kumar, Vinay
The Crew: Vinay, Rajesh, Nilanjan, Chetan Atreyas, Sindhoor Hathwar, Shiva kumar, Vishwas HK, Bhavana, Achintya kundu, Satish Anand, Vivek v Velankar, Shreejit, Jayalakshmi, Sajal Agarwal, Anitha, Anusha Hegde, Pragathi Rao, Varun mylariah, Deepthi
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