Coorg trip with me and my wifey

Hi All,

It's been quite some time that I update my blog with some stuff. I call this period the Dormat one cos was busy with lot of stuff going around. Last time when I posted a real article was about more than 2 years ago. Been a long time and have grown up a lot in last 2 years.

Looks like writing a book about what I did in the past did not turn up well. Well now on I n see that blogging is about information, so here’s a snippet about my Coorg trip with wifey (Yipeeeee yes for all of you m married now ..sorry gals :P).

The trip was planned suddenly but I did do some amount of planning which is highly unlikely in case of individuals like me any how marriage changes you so I had to do some planning to convince wifey that we are actually heading somewhere.

So where should I start from, well after doing some research I found that if you are not willing to shell 3K per night per person for your holidaying then Home Stay’s are the best options available. All the branded resorts and jungle huts are too expensive for a traveller like me. Gimme a break I don’t need an AC room while m @ Hill station and a plush bed. So my recommendation is go with a home Stay. Because of my lovely sis I got a reference for the home stay, she always comes to rescue when M in dilemma. The details are mentioned below:

NARI KADI Home Stay

Kutta Town, NAGARHOLE National Park.

Contact Person: Mr T T Raghu : 9448504203 and 9972232400 and 08274-244175

NARI KADI

(Although this would not open the page for the home stay but would redirect you to some other travel website)

When I spoke to this guy, he told me to transfer some amount of money as a part of Advance booking. I did NEFT for the account in CANARA bank from my CITIBANK account which came back to my account in 3 days. So transfer only if you have a CANARA Bank account.

So we started the journey and before that Mr Raghu made sure that we know the route properly.

Here’s the snippet of the route we took to Reach Kutta town:

Bangalore --> Mysore(Take diversion before city) --> Iruvala --> HUNSUR --> HUNSUR TOWN --> Go to the Old Bus Stand in Hunsir town --> You will find a Petrol BUNK (Take Left from there) --> Take the NAGARHOLE NATIONAL Park Road --> CROSS the NAGAHOLE National Park --> KUTTA Town CANARA BANK.

Well the journey took about 6 hrs here are few highlights of the Journey and points to be taken care of:
1. Do try to stop and spend some time staring @ Hills of RAMANAGARAM, they are too good of a view and remember the good old lines of movie Sholay “Tera kya hoga kaliya” .. :P.
2. Then if you have a lill one waiting @ home or he/shes travelling with you in that case do take a halt @ Chennapatna and buy him some toys made of wood.
3. For the tiffin or breakfast always stop by @ branded places like CCD’s or adigas or kamats, they have neat n clean rest rooms which are much needed to freshen up.
4. If you are a photography enthusiast then you have n number of halts to take and capture the lush green fields.
5. Do enjoy the sounds of wild life while passing through the NAGARHOLE National park keep the windows open and don’t play music to listen to the sounds of chirping birds. Keep you cameras ready and keep taking shots of the herds of Deer and Elephants.

Day 1:
Recco is to start in the morning so that you reach your home stay by after noon and have sumptuous lunch there.  Well we reached to the Kutta town and found that it was a small village. It was not big deal to find the place it was about 500 meter from Canara bank kutta town. Since this was my first experience to stay @ Home stay I had my apprehensions but my apprehensions were laid to rest once I saw my room and the property. Huge house with an amazing view and especially my room had a cool view of the 40 acre property with lush green fields and a small pond too. The guys were too hospitable and lunch was just too good. Don’t forget to mention that you are a non-veg loving guy, the variety available @ home stay was amazing.
To get rid of the tiredness of the trip we crashed for some time and as usual the time passed by in the serene environment of the property. We got our senses back @ 5 PM, it was late the ideal plan should be to get up by 4 and head to the IRUPU FALLS which is an awesome place to see, but since we were late we missed it and so we were guided to head to WAYANAD road and see the Thirunelly temple which is a 5000 year old temple located in WAYANAD Forest which was @ a distance of about 23 Kms from home stay.
We reached the temple it was almost evening and sun was setting but the temple had some considerable crowd because the coming Monday was Onam. We spent some time there bought some souvenirs’ and headed back to the home stay which we reached at around 8:30 PM. There was another family staying there, we met them in amidst circle of Bon Fire, we chatted for some time and then headed for dinner. Since the other family was pure vegetarian we decided to go 2nd. As usual dinner was again finger licking a home cooked food with varieties. Highly recommended is the Rassam from  Mr Raghu’s wife.
While waiting for the dinner Mr Raghu fixed us for doing white water rafting. If you go from his home stay the rates are discounted from 1200/- to 1000/-. With eagerly waiting for the next day adventure we crashed for the gud nite sleep and that’s how the day 1 ended for us.

Day 2:
Well the next day we decided to be early birds to take a walk along the property which again did not work out so we decided to get ready for the white water rafting adventure. We got up and freshened up and yes of you are going for white water rafting then taking bath n going there is not a great idea, I’ll tell you why is it so later on. We reached camp @ around 9:20 am n guess what there were not too many people to start the trip, so we had to wait for about an hour to get the first trip started. So me and wifey took a stroll around the dense forest and enjoyed the nature. The walk was amazing and we clicked some great shot’s of the Cauvery River and surroundings. We came back to the rafting camp and the guy who owns the place whose name is Alok askd me to check if there were any leeches dat I got and guess wat there was one which had stuck onto my ankle. Wifey screamed and first words which came out of me were “this is so cool”.. I know this was wired but yeah I had not experienced a leach before. Alok took a burning wood from the bon fire and stuck it onto the leech. The leech came of and there was some bleeding for next 10 minutes and then it clotted there.
In an hours time there were other people who joined the camp. To give you a snap shot of the place of how it looked like you can see this Making a splash , after going through this I don’t need to introduce you to Alok, Mahender and Subhash. I had Mahender as my guide. He was friendly. We learned the basics of commands and we started to set off and start the expedition.
I dunno wat to write of what I did there just wanna say that it’s about an experience and it’s just out of the world. I’ll say that if you are low on confidence then you must try this and will give you ouzels of confidence and much needed strength to look upto life with much more dexterity.
It’s a MUST DO !!!

This adventure was over by 2:00 PM, the whole episode took @ around 3 hrs including the training and completing all the rapids.
Then it was time for lunch but we were not left with much of a time to have one so we directly headed to the irupu falls and in the mean time we munched on to some chips and dharwad pedas which my sweet wife carried along (some buttering for her in such a long post). To reach the falls you need to walk about a kilometre which is relatively less than other places. We reached there took some neat snaps captured our moments in the camera. The falls was worth it and amazing and both of us loved the site and loved the ambience, it was too romantic. Looked like a site of Mungaaru Male movie and I felt like Ganesh with my heroine along with me in this case though :P.
After this it was around 4:00 PM and we headed back to the home stay where the lunch was waiting for us. We went directly to the lunch table there and since we were hungry we enjoyed the rice noodles with some neat chicken and fish. After that it was time to crash again which we did and we got awesome coffee in the evening. We were just thinking what to do for the evening then Raghu’s son Monish offered us a ride though his jeep in the jungles of Wayanad. We hopped on with other family and the view of some wild rabbits and deers were amazing. We could not spot a Bison though, but the ride was too good.
After the ride was over we joined the other family for the dinner and we chatted over the dinner and then again we crashed after the dinner in the mean time we got the iternary for the next day set. The plan was to have break fast and then leave for places to see. Since it was the final day we had some stringent deadlines to meet to cover the places which we had to see. 



Day 3:
So the third day started and guess what .. this time we got up and we were on time we left the home stay at around 8:30 am in the morning. We had the route set and we knew which places to skip. Thanks to Monish for telling us which places were worth giving a skip. So we started our journey. The first destination was to head to Talakaveri. 

The plan was something like this:
TALAKAVERI --> COORG --> KUSHALNAGAR --> MYSORE

The day consisted of long hours of drive and seeing the places with a surge of Urgency. TALAKAVERI is a must visit place, this is just amazing in terms of the scenic beauty and the temple is neat and clean. While we were there the weather was bit cloudy so missed the view part of the place. So we headed for the drive to coorg and by the time we reached there it wqas 4:00 PM and we hogged onto a place to have lunch. My wife was hapy to find some north Indian food after 2 days of sambhar and rassam and I must say the feeling was mutual. After that we headed to Kushalnagar. The Buddhist monastery reminded me of Bodh Gaya and Rajgir in BIHAR. Love the peace and serenity of the place and would love to there again to visit again to grab some more snaps in my camera. Must do is to have some Momos from local joints. Then we headed back to Bangalore as it was already 7:00 PM.

A sudden VISIT to Mysore:
As we were heading back our driver suggested that if we spent 1 more hour then may be we can see mysore palace lighting as it was a Sunday. We decided to give it a shot and missed the lights by 3 minutes. Anyhow it was worth the effort cos it was for the first time my wife saw such a palatial palace (this is a new word to express wat she felt). Spending some 20 minutes there and did some spot shopping and left for Bangalore.


That's it guys hope this was informative will continue to post the same again and again.