Trip to ‘Kalavarahalli’ Betta

13^th July, 2007 2:30 am

The previous night we decided that we‘d go to this place... Santhosh (Anna) had been there and he told us about his experience…and since there were no classes on Friday, we rented a cab and were ready to leave….

Our gang consisted to 11 boys and 2 girls…

Santhosh (anna), me, Nikhil, Bala, Krishna (Narayana), Gowthaman (gooth), Sagar, Pranav, Vijay, Vikranth (Ramanolla),Vivek, Seema and Bhaswati

This place is around 90 km from Electronics City….and is pretty well known by its other name ‘Paappagni Mata’ temple. This is also called ‘A place in the clouds’. As per Anna’s instructions, we had got some snacks and some bottles of water. Since this place was inside a village, we wouldn’t get any eatables. We were on our way by 3 am. We reached the place at around 4:45 am. Everyone was excited and a bit nervous as well about the trip. Most of us hadn’t made a trekking trip before this. Since it was a bit dark when we arrived, Anna asked if we wanted to start right away or wait until there was some light….we were in such an ‘enthu’ that we decided to start walking…We starting walking to the footsteps of the hill…and we couldn’t even see what we were stepping on…a few meters ahead, there was slush mixed with mud and that made it slippery to walk…but then, we continued on way slow and steady…and then there it was…the huge mountain….it was some 5000 feet high and we were there to climb it…

I was just stunned…. I thought we were going to walk across some portion of plains for most of our trek…I couldn’t walk out here! I had to go along with the gang….and so the trek started…. Initially some rocks were interspersed with sand on the way and it was easy to walk….after some distance, there was wet sand as well…and it started to skid…

I was wearing tennis shoes and they just didn’t have any semblance of grip. I sought the help of Nikhil (had previous trekking experiences) going in front of me. He asked me to hold his hand whenever I felt like slipping or skidding. Even while climbing a flight of stairs, I am a clumsy oaf…and need I explain my clumsiness while climbing a mountain??

The angle of ascent started increasing gradually….initially it was flat and slowly the angle increased to around 70 degrees. I don’t have very good stamina and normally start panting in about 10m of a 100m race…the same case here also, and we hadn’t even crossed the quarter mark. I drank some water and continued on my way…

As we went higher, the trek started getting dangerous. One wrong step on the left side, and we just had to go sliding down. There were some monkeys on our gang as well….monkeys, as in, they would climb just about anything that resembled a rock. The monkeys were Narayana and gooth. Halfway through the trek, all the snacks had vanished…the other half of the gang (me included) was going at a quicker pace, and the other gang had the bags and was moving slower. It was a hungry pack of wolves that would just about gobble anything they got….we were hungry as well and waited for the bags to arrive…only to see empty covers inside….

We drank some more water and continued on our way….as we climbed higher, the air started getting colder. But we had the cheekiness to even remove our vest and brave the chilly air. Fog had clogged up most of our visibility and limited it to just 3 feet. We nicknamed the fog ‘nothing’. Questions like ‘why did we come here all the way?’…’to see nothing’ and exclamations like ‘nothing is beautiful’ came up on the way….

The fog covered up most of the mountain, and we had to find our way through some gaps that would lead us to a place even higher up. Some places even had rocky walls indicating that were was some sort of a fort built previously. At one point, the flag of ‘Karnataka’ was hoisted on a pole. We went past the flag till the edge of the mountain. There was also a ‘Ganesha’ temple at that height. The entrance was pretty small and we could only have a look from the outside. Behind the temple was a huge wall extending for a good 500 meters. Beyond that, was the point of no return! We had a good time near the edge posing with different aesthetics…

At about 10 am, we decided it was time to come down. There were some goose bumps as to how we were going to reach base camp…me being a slippery customer was even more worried. I got some words of advice from gooth and Nikhil and managed to continue my downhill trek without much worry. We reached base camp at around 11 o clock. The trek was equivalent to performing around 5000 squats on a single day at the gym. We were all weary trekkers by now and once inside the van, there was the uniform sound of silence!!!