Kudremukh national park / Thirumaleguppi

Waking up at 4 am in the morning for a trip is only "right", when you are organizing it;). Otherwise you are allowed to sling abuses at your dear organizer friend, who woke up early so that you can sleep for precious 30 more mins. So you can guess that my recent trip to Chikmagalur was really helpful in enlightening my soul or whatever equivalent part I have. We went for 2 days to this absolutely beautiful resort called Eagle Eye . The prices were really reasonable (coming from a marwadi, you better believe it), and the service was perfect. Hopefully one day I will get money to put all these advertisements in my blog.

Anyhow this post is not about the Chikmagalur trip :P , it is about a trek in Kudremukh National Park. Because of the Chikmagalur trip I realized that instead of watching western ghats from a distance, actually trekking on them will give me an excellent opportunity to have nice Facebook profile photos. So once again I looked at BMC calendar and found one more way to waste a weekend.

We left from Bangalore at around 10 in the night and reached "Samshe" village at 6 am, where this board confirmed that we were not lost. Kudremukh means "mouth of horse" in Kannada. Before we could memorize the name, Krishna told us that we are not going to climb Kudremukh but the peak named Thirumaleguppi (Krishna is the name of our guide:)). Instead of learning the new name, now I am content enough to copy-paste it from the BMC website.

From there we had a 5 km jeep ride to Mullodi which fulfilled all my fantasies about Essel world and Fun Kingdom. Below there are some photos to give you an idea. We had breakfast and left our excess luggage at the base camp ( Satish's house in Mullodi village). The trek started at 9:30 in the morning and it didn't even took us an hour to commend our choice for the weekend. We had an additional guide Raghunath from the village. His specific job was to eradicate any doubt that we have completed significant part of the trek. We climbed four peaks one after another having steep slope, with constant rain, wet grass and slippery rocks helping us all the way. The views were absolutely breathtaking with clouds and green mountains fighting for our attention.

One of the main attractions is the special ecosystem there. There are huge meadows interspersed with "rainforest" of very small width. It seems that harsh monsoon winds don't let anything grow over the open faces except grass, but the valleys hidden from these wind
s having abundant water behave like rainforests. Passing these weird natural creations we reached the peak "Thirumaleguppi" at around 1:00. Amid constant rain, wind and tiredness; simple rice tasted much better than all the Shahi Paneer and Dal Bati :). We returned to the base camp at around 5 in the evening.

We were greeted by tea and hot bhajji (hot in every sense). By the way there is a restaurant "R.R." in bangalore famous for its birayani, also called "Roaring Rectum" :). Since constant rain extinguished (literally) any chance of campfire, we decided to play DumbC. We were clearly losing until one of our teammate gave the movie
The Assasination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford
Our team never looked back, and scored a comfortable win ( lets say atleast a draw). The time before dinner was filled with customary Antakshari, where a single guy "Gopala" won against all of us:P.

Since there was only one toilet for 20 of us, so we decided to go to waterfall ... for taking bath. As a small puzzle try to find the 4 people in the photo on the left. Anyway after having breakfast we had the same adventure ride again. Our stay in Mullodi village was pretty pleasant. The food was simple but nice at Satish's house in Mullodi, and the place was well kept andclean. His phone number is 08263-249595/9481074530. This is another blog about trek in the same area.