Kudremukh Trek

There are many companies in Bengaluru that organize various treks in Karnataka as well as whole of India. Chose to go through a company called Plan The Unplanned or PTU for short. Some organizers start on Friday evening and bring you back on Sunday evening. With PTU, it started in early hours of Saturday and ended in early hours of Monday. One reason I chose PTU was that its pickup point was near to my home. Journey to the trek started on Saturday November 30 at 5:30 AM in a tempo-traveler. Had tasty breakfast at restaurant Kichchana Halli Mane at Koppa on Bangalore – Mangalore high way. I came to know later that the restaurant belongs to popular Kannada actor Sudip. In fact, you can see his photos on the walls of the restaurant.

We stopped at Sri Annapoorneshwari Coffee shop at 12:30 PM for a few minutes of relaxing as a restaurant for lunch was expected only after another two hours. It is a small shop where you can get freshly made various kinds of lemon drinks and some other kinds of drinks including soft drinks in addition to coffee and tea. You can buy chocolates, biscuits and other packaged snacks as well. There are even toilets behind the shop. Next, we stopped at Sagar Multicuisine Restaurant in Kalasa at 2:30 PM for lunch. It is a spacious restaurant and has a lot of place for parking vehicles.

Continued our journey towards our home-stay but stopped at Samse around 3:15 PM to go on foot to waterfall Elanneru which is about 2 kilometers from the main road. Towards the end of the walk, we noticed a different waterfall on the right side of the road where its water flows below the road. Turned left before the waterfall to reach base of the Elanneru waterfall. But we had to climb a hill on the left side to reach the main waterfall. Though it was a bit difficult to climb, we enjoyed once we were there. After spending about two hours at the waterfall, reached Bella Home-stay at about 5:30 PM.

We had snacks and tea/coffee in the evening at 6:30 PM and dinner at 8:30 PM. The Bella home-stay is essentially a dormitory with separate rooms for men and women with many beds in each room but with single bath room. However, there are five common bath rooms on the ground floor. Our stay was quite comfortable. We had campfire as well. Dining hall is separate and is quite spacious with three rows of tables and chairs.

Next day was the day of our trek. We got ready by 6:30 AM, had breakfast, collected lunch packs in steal boxes and drove in two jeeps at about 8 AM for about ten kilometers to police check point from where the trek starts. We reached it in about 15 minutes. The police verified our names and checked backpacks. They did not allow torches, batteries, plastic bags and even drones. We had to deposit such items there to be collected on return from the trek. It is suggested that you carry any eatables such as biscuits and snacks in steel boxes as anything in plastic wrappers is not allowed from that point. If you are carrying water in usual mineral water bottles, you are asked to declare and make sure you bring them back. Finally we started our real trek from the police check point at about 8:30 AM.

On the way, we reached a big tree with a platform around it in 10 minutes. This is one of the nice places to have group photos. We reached a board displaying number of kilometers to reach the peak after 40 minutes. Unfortunately the number is not visible as it was wiped out by somebody. After some time, the Kudremukh peak came into visibility. At 10:00 AM we reached another point where there was a display board containing primates of the Kudremukh forest. It is supposed to have lion-tailed macaque, Hanuman langur and Malabar slender loris, but we did not come across any of them. At 10:40 AM we stopped at a water stream where we could relax on rocks in the stream and take a few photographs.

In another few minutes the scene changed with clouds embracing the mountain and so we had to pass through them. We reached another milestone at 11:00 AM, where we found a big rock for us to sit on it and take some more photographs. After a little bit of climbing we found a flat surface for a few meters where we passed through clouds once again. Reached a final stream at 11:43. This was the last chance for us to fill our water bottles before we reached the Kudremukh peak in another 10 minutes. All our group members were on the peak by 12:00 noon. 

We finished lunch soon after that and wanted to take some photographs but rain god did not permit but drenched us with a lot of rain. As we did not know when the rain was going to stop, we started trek back after a few minutes. But the cloudy weather presented us with beautiful scenes of the Kudremukh mountains while coming back from the peak. We reached back to the police check point well before 5 PM and the home-stay before 6 PM. After early dinner we started back to Bengaluru at about 7:30 PM and reached the city before 4 AM with good memories of the trek.

PTU managed the trek very well and maintained punctuality throughout the trek.