Trip to Hogenakkal

My wandering and trekking senses were all jammed in last 4 months and my fingers were also dying to scribble something on the BlogSpot. The reason being simple, I haven't gone anywhere out of Bangalore these days.

The initial plan was to go to Jog falls. i.e. to start from here on Friday night and return back on Sunday night. But then later it got turned down because people had some other work at home and staying 2 days out was not possible. Then we ended up planning for Hogenakkal. The initial plan was to go on the bikes (as it was only 130 KM from Bangalore), but rain had some other plans. As soon as "Indradev" heard that we are planning to go on bikes, it started raining heavily. We had once thought of canceling the plan. But then someone came up with the idea of hiring a Scorpio. So we booked it for Saturday plan was final.

We were 6 people Sathya, Ravi, Rajiv, Avinash, Naveen and me. The plan was to start on Saturday (15-Sep-2007) from here (Bangalore) at 6:30 A.M. sharp, but as always I got late and we started at around 6:55 A.M. Ravi knew the route to the place, so we did not find it too difficult to head towards it. We took the Hosur road and went upto Hosur. There we had our breakfast. Then from there, we took a right towards "Thali" as we wanted to take the route to "Rayakottai" after a few kilometers we took a left to go towards "Rayakottai". This is SH-85. At Rayakottai we turned right towards "Palacode" on SH-17. Condition of these two roads is bad (really bad in some patches). The main reason is that they are widening the road, so Ravi and Rajiv had to bear lot of bouncers (as they were on the back seat and the driver had decided that worse the road, faster he is going to drive).

Then we turned right on SH-60 towards Hogenakkal. At this point we realized that we should have come via the same SH-60 from "Dharmapuri". This road is very decent.

We reached to Hogenakkal at around 11:00. As soon as we parked the vehicle, all the boatmen started banging our heads to hire a coracle. The rates of coracle depends upon your bargaining power. Fortunately, we had Sathya and Ravi with us to do that job. And they did it very efficiently. So, we decided not to straight away take the coracle and spend some time exploring the place at our own instead. So, we had seen a couple of small falls there and took some photographs. Then when the boatman agreed to our amount, we got into the coracle and headed towards the main fall. The main fall is exactly in the middle of the river and you have to hire a coracle to get there. In another half an hour we we at the main fall. The view there is splendid. It's just unexplainable in words. It is a horse-shoe shaped fall, where the flow of Cauvery is so powerful that you get wet because of the water sprinkles coming from down.

After spending sometime there we started back to our vehicle. There we ate Idli-wada (that we had packed on the way) and started again back to the small falls, we earlier looked. Until we reached to the small falls, we (me, Naveen and Sathya) did not have any plans to enter into the water. But when we reached there, we could not help, but got into the water. There we took sun-bath, sand-bath, water-bath etc. etc. ;-) We enjoyed a lot there cracking jokes and throwing stones in the river to compete on whose stone takes maximum bounces. Then we once again hired a coracle to reach to our vehicle.

We stared back at around 5:00. This time we decided that we are going to follow the SH-60 till Dharampuri. The road is really good. At Dharampuri, we took a left on NH-7 and reached Bangalore at around 9:15.

The entire journey was around 400 KM, which includes travel within the Bangalore also.

If you are a fish lover(read eater), then this is a good place as you will get lots of fishes fried in all kind of local "masala" ;-) But for a person like me (vegetarian) the smell is just too much. Fortunately, I had cold, so my nostrils we all choked. So I managed to survive there ;-) There you can get body massage also, which we did not want to :-).

Overall, we enjoyed a lot and we all were happy that finally we got out of Bangalore for sometime and were with mother nature.