Kari Mala Gopuram Trek

Day 4 - 30th Sept, 2009
Since this one is the toughest among all the parambikulam, we planned to start early. Informed our guide on the previous day to arrange the food parcel before 7:30AM.

We were all ready by 7:00AM, we ate our breakfast at lakshmi hotel, who charged at par with any normal hotel in bangalore. Our lunch parcel got delayed because of the morning breakfast rush in the hotel. We got our parcel around 8:30AM. Guide farooq replaced guide murugesh for this trek. By the time we reached the parambikulam dam, it was 9:00AM.


Karimala Gopuram trek starts from the dam. As our guide informed about the leech population in this trail, we had applied lot of dettol mixed with tobacco powder. Few, who didn't like the tobacco powder smell, applied only dettol. Babu made some nice sticks for us from the trees.
We started our trek. The trail is steepy from the beginning of the trek. We had to stop couple of minutes after every 10 minutes of climb. Too many Leeches all around. As soon as you slow down your pace or stop at some place,minimum 5 leeches claim on the foot. We were all busy in removing them as we walked. Bliss walked ahead of all of us.Wanderer and Moon Light were at the end. Bridget started counting the number of leeches she removed from her shoes. She got around 200 leeches altogether till she reached back the base.

As we walked very slowly on the steep, We reached the middle of the trial around 1:00PM, which was late as per our calculation. We all had our curd rice with yummy Ginger pickle. Took some rest.Since Wanderer was low on that day, Wanderer decided to stay at the rock and asked us to climb the peak and come back. Guide Babu stayed with her. We headed up after lunch break. Since we need to climb down before the sunset, we increased our pace. It was drizzling quite often. As we all had our rain coats on, we kept walking inside the ever green forest.

Last few kilometers there are no trees, But Lot of grass were there. Our guide said that elephants come here for this grass especially. We saw couple of marks which indicated that baby elephants palyed over the grass land. On the grass land, the trial is actually maintained by the elephants. We followed the elephant pug marks and climbed the steep by holding the grass, which gave very strong support. We saw a small black viper snake. Our guide used the stick to clear the grass, it went away. Since it was 2:30PM already, the last mile to the peak we didn't cover :(.






We relaxed on the grass land, had a nice view of the catchment area, clouds passed across us. Had the chocolates :), took lots of photos and some videos.
Then guide gave a signal to start otherwise we can't go back before sunset.We started climbing back. As always, Climbing down was easy, but the load goes to knees. We made small steps to avoid much of load on the knees. We came back to the rock, middle of the trial, where Wanderer and guide Babu were waiting for us. Took 10 minutes break, shown all the photos and videos. Left the rock, headed back to the dam. We saw swinging tree, we tried to swing like a tarzan... and then started walking down.
This time, Bliss was coming at the end. His policy is to be the first when you enter the forest and to be the last when you come out of the forest, to make the most of it :) We reached around 6:00PM. The SUMO that we arranged for the morning safari was there at the base. We took some snaps and went to the tiger hall in SUMO.

You can read more about our parambikulam experience from the main blog entry on the parambikulam trek blog entry .