Parambikulam Forest

Sept 26th - oct 4th 2009
Considering 2 long weekends, Seven of us had planned for parambikulam forest trekking, merged those two long weekends and took additional 3 days leave. One of our friend dropped out and six (Archillies, Bliss, Moon Light, Bridget, Wanderer, Sun Shine) of us were ready to leave. Yeah, we got our new nick names :)
All the credit goes to Bliss, who picked this place, planned all the treks
for the seven days in parambikulam bu referring the parambikulam web site, co-ordinated with the forest officers, got permissions, sent money order to book the treks, etc.

This was my first long trekking experience, so I packed more than enough stuff in my
newly bought 4 feet trekking backback :). All others too carried equal amount of baggages.

Day 0

All set and we left bangalore on september 26th early morning, 6:15AM, in a train to coimbatore.We ate dosas in train and played cards. Wanderer was very lucky that day and kept winning. Taught some card playing tricks to Sun Shine. Moon Light reached coimbatore already, met Bliss parents, packed our lunch and waited for us with the tempo traveller near the railway station.

We reached coimbatore, loaded out lugguages into the tempo traveller. Bliss's Mom got hot horse gram rasam to clear our throat. It was very good, I had 2 glasses :) Moon Light got few PET bottles, we stopped at a shop and loaded 12 water cans, 5 litres each. Also Bliss parents got 20 litres water can from home. altogether 80 litres of water for 8 days. Bliss's parents gave some instructions to Bliss, asked us to take care of Bliss, and bid us a bon voyage :)

As Parambikulam Wild Life Sanctuary (PWLS) closes the entry gate at 6:00, we had to reach the place at the earliest and send the tempo traveller out of PWLS. We ate our lunch inside the tempo traveller. We reached the PWLS information centre around 4:00PM, paid the remaining money for the whole package. As they detected some tigers in venkoli peak, they didn't allow that trek for us in our list of treks. So, we picked salim ali centre trek instead of venkoli peak.We saw couple of peacocks and few yellow head, long tail monkeys near PWLS information centre. They allocated a guide for us and opened the gates for us to enter parambikulam. We saw lots of spotted deer. Few people call them as Photo deer, as they pose for the photos :) We saw the 400 years old kannimarra teak on the way.

We reached tiger valley stay around 5:30PM, sent our tempo traveller back, after we were on our feets. We took couple of torches, and couple of cameras. our guide took us to the ThunaKadavu Dam, and a short walk across the dam. The view of ThunaKadavu dam in the evening was awesome, we saw a bison grassing near by the dam, we sighted few birds. walked across the dam, and reached the forest officers building. Our guide got us black tea, my favourite drink and which was the only drink possible to make anywhere inside the forest :). Bridget sat near the water and was alert in case of sudden surprises by the crocodiles :). Guide gave some information about the tunnel that is connected between the Parambikulam dam to Thunakadavu dam.

It started getting dark, so we headed to our tiger valley accommodation with the help of torch, saw coupld of wild boars. Guide informed that sometimes it gets wild and attacks human. So, beware of it.Bliss ate some fruits and went to sleep. We got our food, cooked by tribals and delivered at tiger valley stay. Lots of chappatis, white rice, 1 veg kurma, 2 full Nattu-Koli (country chicken), 8 boiled eggs, egg burji :) We ate whatever we could and gave the rest to our guide. We tried to sleep early to get up early, but another family stayed in another room in the same block. They made lot of noice, didn't listen to our requests to keep silence. When I managed to get sleep, our guide knocked our doors, shouting "their are bisons/Indian Gaurs around the building. Come out and have a look". Some of my friends went out and saw bisons/Indian Gaurs. I and Moon Light slept instead. Even Bliss went out, saw the Bison, came back and said "What a wonderfull Bison?" :)

Next seven days were roamed across most of the trails in parambikulam forest and totally we had covered around 100 Kms on our feet in 7 days :)

Few things to note:
1 - Carry BSNL connection in one of your mobiles, only BSNL network is available over there.
2 - Most of the guides speak tamil. So, better if you have some tamil speaking guys in your group.
3 - The restaurants in parambikulam charge as equal as a normal hotel in Bangalore.

There are lot more to write, each treks deserve a separate blog entry and some activities such as honey collection & drinking, crab catching , etc deserve a separate blog entries.
Check out the links to read about each one...

Day 1 & 2 - Cochin State Forest Tramway Trek
Day 3 - KarianChola Trek
Day 4 - Kari Mala Gopuram Trek
Day 5 - Early Morning Safari in Parambikulam forest
Day 5 - Salim Ali Centre
Day 6 - Moon light census
Day 7 - Tellikal Nights
Day 8 - Out Talk with DFO