Waynad - Trip into God's Own Country

I heard a lot about Kerala being a very scenic place to visit, but could never visit it. So, last week, when my friend AJ who stays in Bangalore and is the cornerstone of all of my bangalore based trips like Bandipur, Mudigere, Shivanasamudram etc, mentioned he will be moving out of bangalore shortly, We decided to have one more trip. After throwing around a lot of names, Waynad stuck.

Located around 300KM from Bangalore in Kerala, Waynad is a popular and scenic hill station. So three of us - vamsi, praveen and myself - from Hyderabad booked tatkal tickets to bangalore. The train arrived late by two hours on Saturday morning at 8:30AM. We joined AJ and Balaji waiting in a Qualis, and started off to Waynad. After paying an RTO toll of Rs 600 at the Kerala-Karnataka border - which surprised us completely, we reached our Hotel in Kalpetta at 4:15. We then immediately left for the scenic Pookode Lake. Since we arrived there at 4:55, and boating in the lake closes at 5:00, we could not get a row boat ourselves, but had a tourism employee take us around the lake.


The employee, over chitchat, revealed that there would be treks to a nearby mountain peak daily, and we were tempted to cancel the next day plans completely and go for the trek. But he warned us that there would be leeches, but we did not care too much for them - how wrong we were! After getting off the boat, we roamed around the lake, and at one point my friend balaji and vamsi waded into a patch of water which was overflowing onto the path. Rest of us decided against it, and instead turned back. We went to the canteen and saw a group of people trying to get a leech off a guys leg using a pair of matches... Alarmed we immediately checked our own legs, and sure enough we found two leeches on Balaji's feet. It had sucked a decent amount of blood, and after removing them the blood would not clot, due to some anti-coagulant that the leech releases.

We rushed to the hotel room, and thoroughly cleaned ourselves, and vamsi who was wearing shoes, found two leeches on his sock, but which, luckily, could not penetrate the skin. After this rude jerk, we decided that tomorrow's trek was a lost cause. We then had a beer followed by dinner, and played cards until 12:30AM and then went to bed.

Next day morning at 8:30AM we visited the nearby Banasura Sagar Dam, and then went on a speed boat ride around it. Then we went to a supposedly scenic view point, but it was covered in complete clouds and had a visibility range only a couple of meters - leaving us staring into the whiteness. Finding nothing interesting in the vast whiteness, we started off to Soochipara waterfalls.

After reaching the place, we had to climb down a lot of steps to reach the base of the water fall. It was a very picturesque scene, and the water fall was in full force due to the recent monsoon. It is basically a 3 stage waterfall. After playing around on the rocks for some time, we then took a different set of steps to reach the 2nd stage of the water fall. We could not get close to it, but it was breathtaking. Later we went to another path to a view point. It was almost 4:30 PM by the time we reached the parking lot again. We decided we did not have time to visit the Edakkal caves which close at 5PM.

After buying a couple of souvenirs, We then started back to the hotel and freshened up. Later at around 7PM we started the long journey back to Bangalore. On the way back our Qualis hit a big bump in the road, and one of the tyre's rim got bent, and started hitting the disk brake. So we had to replace the tyre and were back on our way. It was almost 2PM by the time we reached bangalore.

Overall it was a very nice trip, with a lot of interesting experiences. I am looking forward to visit the rest of Kerala some time soon.