Thellikal Nights

Day 7 - 3rd Oct, 2009
After few hours of sleep in the machan, we all got ready by 7:00AM, ate the remaining bread, jam, banannas, etc. We trekked few kms ahead of the machan to chcek out the animals. Unfortunately, we didn't see any. We started walking back to parambikulam village. That was 5 kms. We reached parambikullam village, refreshed ourself, ate lunch, packed curd rice for the dinner at thellikal nights, boarded the bus around 1:00PM, reached parivari pallam. from there we need to trek 8 kms to reach thellikal nights stay. It started raining as soon as we got down from the bus. we put our rain coats on, started walking. Sunshine had an head ache, gave the local balm, which we bought at the eco centre shop. Luckily, there were no leeches on this trail.

On the way, murugesh found some guava trees, plucked lot of guavas. Then found a amla tree, plucked few amlas. It was nice walking in the forest when it is drizzling. We reached the Panthera den, near the thellikal vayal around 4:30PM. We ate one pack of curd rice with pickle. Bliss took some mind map notes about the treks, Moon light slept a bit. Sunshine and Wanderer were resting themselves after the walk. Babu and Murugesh brought some water from the pond near by to the kitchen and prepared the black tea. Drank the black tea. Archillies and Bridget went for a walk till the pond and came back. Babu and Murugesh shared lot of wild stories that they came across. Once, Babu met with an elephant and it started chasing him. Somehow he ran off and escaped from the elephant, reached his home, and didn't go to work for the next few days it seems. So many stories like that. Archillies was tired and went for a short nap. Bliss and Moon light listened to all the stories.

Suddenly Babu observed that a sambar deer is being hunted by a team of wild dogs. Moon light, Bliss went and saw that with the guides. In few minutes, all the wild dogs cleared off the sambar deer. Archillies got up around 7:00PM. All ate the dinner, went out, saw few sambar deers, malabar squirrel, etc. It was pitch dark, we went back to panthera den, chit chatted for a while and went to sleep early, as we need to walk 8 kms to reach the bus stop to catch the bus at 7:00AM in the morning. We got up at 5:00AM, all got ready quickly, let the place, walked briskly in the morning, took some short cuts, reached the bus stop on time. After few minutes, bus came there, we got into bus, reached parambikulam village, directly went to the hotel, ate breakfast :)

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