Last week, some of us in the apartment (Hitesh, Ramesh, Mukund and me) decided to go on short treks atleast once a month. We decided to have our first such outing on yesterday (Sunday, 19th July 2009).
It was early in the morning, as early as 5:30 AM that we started our drive towards a place called "Devara Betta", situated somewhere close to Anekal, but in Tamil Nadu. Initially I had this feeling that its gonna be real cold and I was ready with jackets, monkey cap (if needed) etc. But surprisingly it was not that cold.
Hitesh had been to this place many times before and thanks to his sense of directions and memory for remembering the roads and crosses, we reached the destination by 6:30 AM. One more pleasant surprise awaited us - Hitesh had packed some hot hot tea for all of us. Wow, it was so refreshing to drink the tea and start the trek.
The place is having some monolithic rock formation, few small hills and ample forest across the hills. It was really picturesque with green covers everywhere. Added to that, weather was so pleasant.
After having the tea, we took the path leading to the forest, just to explore the area. None of us had any idea about where each of those trails will lead us, but we just followed on. We could hear so many different kinds of sounds and songs from so many different birds. Hitesh being a veteran in bird-watching, he named many of those birds, none of which I can remember :-) We walked for almost one hour going past many "decision points". Typically after somtime, each of the trails used to fork into multiple different routes. We had a thumb rule that "when in doubt, take the right" and went on :-)
After one hour, we kind of reached a dead-end, where we could see the valley and a thick forest range of Bannerghatta. We enjoyed this scenery for about 15 minutes and started trekking back. This time, we took some short cuts, did some rock climbing to reach to the top of one more hill nearby. We relaxed there for some time, had some "chikkis" which Mukund had got and walked back towards our car. By 8:45 AM, we had finished our morning walk in the forest and were all set to return.
We took a different way while coming back. There is a place called "Thalli", about 5 KMs from Devara Betta where we stopped by and had some yummy breakfast. Then we took Maralawadi--Harohalli--Kanakapura road -- NICE road -- Bannerghatta road to reach home by 11 AM. The drive from Thalli to Harohalli is just fantastic, passing by forest range, agricultural lands, lakes etc. For miles together, we were the only ones on the road. With some Kishore Kumar numbers being played on the FM and a fantastic weather, it was definitely a drive to remember. If you want to try this weekend get-away, you can get more information in this link:
Next, we are planning for a jungle trek in Bannerghatta national park sometime during August.
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