The long awaited Bangalore - Mangalore railway service starts today with the ceremonial train between the two cities being flagged off by the Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. The services had been stopped for the last 11 years mainly due to safety reasons, now the tracks have been converted from metre -gauge to broad-gauge. These tracks run through Western Ghats, one of the most picturesque locations on earth. The reopening of the tracks will be bad news for lot of trekkers/hikers who come here every year. The 56km trekking spot runs from Sakleshpur to Subrahmanya. The tracks run some 3100 feet above the sea-level, with 60 tunnels (the longest tunnel being more than half a kilometer), more than 100 bridges and some 25 waterfalls. I myself have been to Sakleshpur for 2 fascinating treks.
May 2005:
A two day trek from Sakleshpur to Subrahmanya with a group of 15 trekkers from Tejas Networks. The trek started from Sakleshpur at around 5:30am. Direction was never a problem as we had to walk along the tracks, but long walking on the sleepers could be a real pain. We stopped at an old station called Donigal at 8:30am for breakfast. The occasional rain made us to get out our rain gear, but that didn't dampen our spirits. It was just a small price we had to pay for the beautiful scenic feasts our eyes were to be treated with. The real challenge was crossing of bridges which had wooden sleepers, some of them decayed over time and slippery due to rain. The sleepers had enough gap between them for an average person to slip down and it was hard to focus as we walked because you could see the bottom of the valley some 700 meters below. We were all cautious, and had to cross these bridges slowly and carefully. One bridge in our path was called the "Killer Bridge" (for obvious reasons), had couple of its wooden sleepers missing in the middle of the bridge, so crossing it really gave us the shivers. Crossing this bridge was a balancing act of walking one foot in front of the other over a narrow truss that runs along the side of the bridge. The second challenge were the tunnels, which were long, dark and spooky. Couple of times we were attacked by low flying bats inside the tunnel. We were glad that we had got our torches for this trip. It was exciting, not knowing which one of these challenges we were going to face next, but it kept on coming one after another. We were in attack mode. We were moving into some of the most spectacular sceneries of the Ghat section, the fog and rain made it even beautiful. After lunch we met lot of other trekking groups enroute to Yedukumeri, an old station and our final halt for the day. Yedukumeri was an old railway station and had couple of old station rooms (even though they were in ruins). The trekking group that reached Yedukumeri first got these rooms. Thanks to fast guys like me, our group got both the rooms for ourselves. We cooked food for dinner and slept in our wet sleeping bags.
Day two, we had some change in plans. We were not going to Subrahmanya as we had some injured trekkers in our group after the 12 hour continous walking (over sleepers) the previous day. Going downhill was not an option as the rivers had flooded because of continous rain. We heard from a localite that there was a village on top of the mountain range nearby and there was a transport bus from there at 1pm. So we started from Yedukumeri at 6am towards the village. After walking along the tracks for almost an hour, then we started climbing the mountain. It was steep with thick vegetation, which made it even more difficult to climb. To make matters even worse, there were leeches running all over our bodies sucking the life out of our bodies. We took nearly 3 hours to climb the mountain. Finally on top, we were struggling to catch our breathe, all that turned into gasps as we saw the breath taking view of the Ghat mountain ranges around us. After another hour of walk we reached the small village on top of the mountain. The villagers were excited to see us, some invited us to their house and gave us breakfast. The villagers were really friendly, we took pictures with them. Our group raided the only shop in the village, it was like the shopkeeper had won a lottery. The 1pm bus was the only bus to that village, we prayed for the bus to come on that day, as our fate depended on it. You should have seen our faces as the Karnataka KSRTC bus pulled up at the village. Although the bus found it tough to carry us over the hill, I was glad this old rickety bus had made it to take us back into civilization.
January 2006:
Ever since the last abandoned trip to Subrahmanya, our group wanted to make another trip to Sakleshpur as we wanted to complete the trek. The Republic day holiday seemed like the nice time to take the trip. Our group had only eight guys this time but from four different companies in Bangalore. The excitement was little less this time as we already knew our challenges and the surprise factor was missing. This time we decided to start trekking from Subrahmanya back to Sakleshpur. We reached Subrahmanya Bus Stand at 5am and walked towards the railway tracks. It tooks us couple of hours to climb a mountain and finally reach the tracks. Works on the tracks had started and we could see workers everywhere. At 9am we stopped for breakfast at a small makeshift hotel made for the track workers. We trekked though lot of tunnels and over long wooden bridges as we were again treated with more and more beauty of the Western Ghats. But this time we had another challenge, there were occasionally small engine trucks running over the rails at high speeds, carrying workers and equipments from place to place. As its a single rail track route, we had to make sure that no engine cars were coming as we crossed long bridges. The afternoon sun was unusually hot, making us even more tired. We had to stop many times enroute to recharge ourselves with some energy drinks. After long hours of walking we finally reached Yedikumeri (our half way point) at 3pm only to find that the railway workers had occupied all the station rooms, forcing us to camp on the station platform. We ate and slept after the exhausting day. At 5pm an Engine car stopped at Yedikumeri Station to drop off some workers. The Engineer on board offered to drop us at Sakleshpur and we gladly accepted it. We had shorted our trip thanks to the Engineer, moreover we had already seen the rest of the trip on our last visit. Strangely it took us 2 trips to Sakleshpur, but we finally conquered this trek.
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