A Railway Trek
It was exhausting, I'm still feeling tired two days later. Two days of trekking on railway tracks. Through tunnels and over bridges, mostly walking on ankle shattering rubble. But it was definitely worth it.

We left from bangalore on friday night at around 12. We reached our starting point early next morning, a railway station in Dhonigal. From there we started our walk along the railway tracks. It took about 20 minutes of walking before we had our first casualty, ie me. I now sport a nice cut on my eyebrow thanks to a face first fall onto a concrete sleeper.

The first couple of bridges were a challenge, its a bit scary when there aren't any hand holds. But it gets better once you get over the initial fear of falling. The nice thing is that the bridges got progressively harder. The first few being relative pushovers. So it was easy adjusting to the difficulty.

Along the way we got to stop to swim in a stream, that is the guys got to swim while the girls ended up looking after the bags :-P. I was a little concerned about getting my head wet in the beginning, but its hard not to once you're in the water. I ended up having to get my wound redressed as once I got out.

The rest of the journey that day was fairly uneventful. The walking started getting very exhausting thanks to the afternoon heat. The group I was with got to Yedakumari by around 4 o'clock. Too tired I pretty much crashed the rest of the day.

The plan for day two was to trek on the tracks to Siribagilu, from there to Gundya through the forest and from there on to Subramanya by any vehicle we could catch. Some of the guys decided the cut the trek short and take a different route to Subramanya, ending up having their own adventures.

Day two was a lot harder, we were already tired from the previous day and the weather got a lot hotter, to make things worse we soon started running out of water and couldn't find any streams to fill up. We also also ended up with one more injury with Sachin falling between two sleepers on the tracks. It wasn't serious but he ended up with a rather bad bruise.

With more people getting tired and grumpy it was decided to cut the trip short. And take a deviation off the tracks to a village off the highway.

Towards lunch time we found a stream close to the path to the village, and decided to set up camp there. The water in the stream didn't look potable, A couple of the guys decided to go ahead and get some water from a waterfall apparently about a kilometer ahead, and maybe get a bath. I was too tired by then, and ended staying behind.

After a good lunch and some sleep. I was charged up and decided to go find the stream myself, the urge aided in no small amount by the need to get away from the flies that had started crowding around the camp and the fact the I was sweating like a pig. After some serious walking in the sun I began to realized that the stream was a lot further than a kilometer away from camp. I was almost about to give up when I ran into theju, sudhi_11in(Sudarshan) and Ram Shetty returning with water. Turns out the "waterfall" was nothing more than a tiny stream a couple of inches deep. It wasn't really worth going to the stream, but the largest bridge of the trek was just in front of me. We wouldn't be crossing the bridge since we decided to take the route through the village instead. It took very little effort to convince theju to take another trip across the bridge with me. This was the high point of the entire trek, the bridge is 300 meters across, Its not the highest we crossed, but its probably one of the scariest. And the view is amazing. Totally worth the extra two kilometer trek from camp.

Back at camp tired of waiting for water, jace decided to to sample the stream. And was joined by the rest of the group. This pretty nullified the effort of getting water from the next stream. The most painful part was that the second stream was about about fifteen minutes walk from Siribagilu, meaning a large part of the team had almost reached the original destination and was forced to return because they had left their bags and their teammates behind.

On returning back to camp, I managed some good sleep, this time in a nice cool place with less flies. Once the last of the stream team got back. We made a move to the village, the path we took was some old road probably never used since the 70s when the tunnels were being constructed. It was almost entirely covered by deep gullies from previous rains. This was probably the hardest part because the rocky terrain was very hard on the ankles. It was amazing to finally touch asphalt again at the end of the journey.

Once we got to the highway. We managed to get two jeeps to take us to Subramanya and the rest of the team, who had already made it by then.

Subramanya is the home of a famous temple, a visit to the temple followed by some dinner and we were ready to leave for Bangalore.

This is the first time I've ever done any trekking of any kind. We had a fun trek gang 34 in all. Pretty amazing bunch.

I totally loved it and am looking to doing this again soon. I have to thank theju for organizing the amazing experience, he put up with a lot. Respec!!!

The other trek bloggers (They even have pictures)
Theju
Haas
Jace
Anant

Just pictures (If you don't read)
Theju
Haas 1, Haas 2
Shruthi
Jace
Hemanth