Trek to Marammana Gudda

It was cool n cloudy on Saturday (15/04/06). The weather prediction for Sunday looked great. Myself and Harsha decided to head to Turahalli to become one with the rocks (technically .. bouldering ;-)). I asked Priya if she would like to join. She suggested we go for some trek. We agreed, finally, to go for a one-day trek (women power .. you see). There was a little write-up about Maribetta neat Kanakapura and not many had explored it. We latched on to it :-)

Next day we (Myself & Priya on ThunderBird, Ankur and Swati on Pulsar and Harsha on Victor, poor thing .. Harsha or Victor?? doesn't matter) started late (Indian time :-)). We were on Kanakapura road at 7:30 am. At about 9:30 we were close to the destination. We asked some passersby about Maribetta and they knew nothing about it. Some villagers mentioned about Banth Marammana Betta. We decided to give this place a shot. For every question we asked the villagers started with a warning .. "Sir, vehicle won't go to the top of the hill", "Sir, you are from city, you can't make it", "This is wrong time, the bushes are dry" .. etc but we didn't care.

We took a diversion to the new target.. parked our vehicles in one of the houses in the village. The lady of the house was very nice. She gave us some hints which we smartly ignored just to repent later.
We were so charged up, the normal trek route looked trivial. We took a short cut (vertical path over the monolithic rocks) to the peak (the reader is warned not to follow our footsteps .. in case if he/she does it will be at their own risk ;-)).

The Climb was steep. Priya got the first taste of being on a rocky hill. One wrong step and you are toast. Priya was all sport moving like a snail ;-) on the rocks but not bad considering this is first time on a trek.




Harsha was pissed that the average speed of the group was no way closer to his. So, I decided to give him company for awhile. Meanwhile Ankur and Swati were helping Priya to crawl :-). As we climbed the rock we hit several spots of no return .. can't slide because its too risky and no strong holds to trust our feet. We asked others not to take this route and rather go around the rocks. As myself and Harsha ascended we saw more and more boulders and the peak was nowhere to be seen.

At 2pm we reached top of the hill. We ran out of water and I bet we would've killed some small animal to drink its blood .. but for our luck there weren't even mosquito's on the hill. We could see the others still a good one hour from us. We decided to climb down and meet them .. which never happened.

We descended a little bit and it started to rain (the prediction was it wouldn't). We took shelter in a cave wondering this would've been an ideal resting place for pre-historic men (& animals).

At 5pm it stopped raining and there was no way we could slide on the rocky incline with water streams alongside us. It will be suicidal. We took the route which will take around the rocks. The vegetation (actually only thorny bushes) got thicker and thicker. We couldn't see beyond few feet. We were going down like a football, the only thing on our mind was to touch down before dark. The thorns kissed all over our exposed skin. We were still running low on time and decided to abandon moving towards the village and just go down vertically. At some places, out-of-the bush, there were vertical drops of hundreds of feet. I was really scared at that moment wondering what will we eat, drink if at all it gets dark before we touch down.

Anyway, after few falls, we reached ground level about 3kms away from our starting point. After reaching the village we were concerned to find the other group didn't make it yet. The special tea of the lady was refreshing. She told there are bears in the hills and prowl during night. We were really scared about others. After 2hrs we finally saw them. Everybody was visibly shaken and tired.

It was hell lot of an adventure. We all had a great time and hope to have similar fun treks soon .. but first ... thank god to be back in one piece.