Cut to September 2014.
This was a trip that adventure films are made of. September is not thought of as the best time for wildlife — the birding season usually starts in November, and the tiger season had ended in June. During the monsoon you are not left with many options. Coorg is a region full of fine waterfalls, so I decided to have a go at them over a weekend, and managed to talk two friends into coming along.
I am an early riser, and for weekend trips like this I like to leave the city before sunrise to beat the traffic. But one friend counted getting up at 9 am as an achievement. So after a lot of negotiation we finally set off at 10 am from Bangalore, which is afternoon by my standards. Our vehicle was a friend’s 12-year-old Santro, which I was to drive. It somehow had four wheels and seats, but no power steering and no stereo. My friend realised the last part as we were leaving Electronic City and nearly turned onto NICE Road for Mysore. He said he cannot survive a road trip without a car stereo and his daily dose of Mika and Honey Singh (I wished there were a few more Singhs, any Singh who could shout loud enough in Punjabi). So we turned back and had a stereo fitted to this temporary car. We finally hit NICE Road at about 11 am and reached Mysore around 2 pm, having survived the sound onslaught.
Our first waterfall was Chunchanakatte Falls, some 60 km out of Mysore. I was in sole charge of the route and the stops; one friend was happy with his Punjabi songs, the other as long as the wheels kept moving. Getting to the falls was an expedition in itself, thanks to the Sygic GPS app on my phone, which seemed to think we could fly the car over a paddy field or row it across water. That meant plenty of U-turns and diversions. For a good 10 km it sent us down a two-metre-wide village mud road, before finally taking pity on us and leading us to the falls. While the others chatted, I got out my waterfall kit — a tripod, an ND10 filter and a wide-angle lens — enough to draw curious looks, with a few people taking me for a film-magazine photographer.
We finished up and moved on before sunset. The day’s destination was Madikeri, the capital of Coorg. We gave up on the GPS app and relied on directions from local people, and the rest of the drive was uneventful. We settled into a comfortable homestay in Madikeri for the night. My friend then dragged us from restaurant to restaurant in search of a good mushroom roast — Coorg is known for its mushroom dishes, and he could not find the place where he had had a great one last time. We finally tried three different mushroom preparations at an old restaurant, hoping it would bring us some luck for the next day.
The next morning’s first stop was Abbey Falls, on the edge of Madikeri. We got there by 7 am and had the place to ourselves, and I wondered whether I was the only early riser among all the tourists. The falls were a fine sight, all the better without the usual snack vendors and crowds.
On the way back I came across a gastropod called Indrella ampulla, which I gather is quite common in Coorg.
The next stop was Malalli Falls, some 60 km away. The road was good until about 5 km from the falls, after which it turned into serious off-roading — a mud track with two-foot craters in places. Most people parked at the end of the tar road and walked down, but, being lazy and not knowing how far the track went, we decided to make the car struggle rather than ourselves. A couple of times the car had to drop two feet, with the front or rear wheels hanging in the air, and my friends had to push. Going down was easy; getting back up was another matter, more on that shortly. We reached the last point the car could manage — there is a thin line between laziness and recklessness, and this looked like it — and got out for the 45-minute walk down to the falls. This was one of the best waterfalls I have seen, and as it is not well known, there were only a couple of other people at the base. I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking.
Walking back up the hill was hard work, and reminded us why gyms exist. Once we reached the car, it too remembered the value of horsepower: the little 1,000cc Santro engine could not pull up a couple of the spots it had dropped down so easily. At one point the tyres spun and smoked like an F1 car’s. Luckily a group of six lads was passing and helped push it up. We went back through Madikeri to the last stop of the day, Chelavara Falls.
It had the least to offer photographically, but it was a good place for a dip at the end of a tiring day. The end? Not quite — I still had 250 km to drive home to Bangalore, and it was already 5 pm. Neither friend could drive, so it was down to me. It was meant to be a smooth five-hour drive on decent roads. By 7.30 pm we reached the Nagarhole forest checkpoint, with about 30 km to drive through the forest before exiting. About 10 km in, there was a thud and the car stopped: a tyre had burst. As they say, troubles come in groups, and we realised we had no tyre spanner, so we could not change it ourselves. There were sounds of tuskers not far off, and we were in the middle of a jungle known for tigers, leopards and elephants, wondering whether we were on the menu that night. A vehicle passed only about every ten minutes. After three or four tries, a gentleman in a Scorpio stopped, and his driver changed the wheel for us. We were rescued, and alive. After that it was a routine drive, though I struggled to stay awake. At about 1 am, our journey came to an end.
