Date: June 18–19, 2005

Des­ti­na­tion: Hon­nemardu

The gang: We had a healthy mix of blog­gers and non-bloggers! Adel, Arnab, Chan­der, Dheepak, Nithya, Kavitha, Kripa, Suman, Sathish, Reti­saint, Vasu, Anjana, Anuja, Ganesh, Roopa, Tulsi, Sathish, Senthil and yours truly.

The place:
‘Where the hell is Hon­nemardu’ is one reac­tion you might get when you men­tion the place. Many folks actu­ally have no idea where it is. By the end of this, you’ll soon find out. 

Main­tain­ing deco­rum on trains:
There should be some law not allow­ing peo­ple to make noise on the train after 10 pm. And big fines. We got ticked off by a gen­tle­men for mak­ing too much noise on the Shi­moga Express. Most of the noise came from Suman, Bunty, Adel, Vasu and Venx. 

The anti­quated way:
Have you ever taken a rail­bus? If you haven’t, here’s your chance. It’s a lit­tle sim­i­lar to the trams in Cal, and moves pretty much at the same pace. It takes 3 hours for a 100 km jour­ney. It moves at about 30 km/hr. It’s a good idea to get friendly with the con­duc­tor. In our case, it was a very cute gen­tle­man who Vasu chat­ted up along the way. He also allowed us longer tea breaks. A few team mem­bers took the chance to catch up on some more sleep. Oth­ers cre­ated a ruckus. And yet oth­ers started on the “snakes”. Along the way, hang­ing out of the rail­bus, I soaked in fresh air, beau­ti­ful green sights every­where and the sun com­ing up on the dis­tant hori­zon over the hills. 

The bumpy ride:
We decided not to walk to Hon­nemardu to get extra time in the water. Two jeeps were orga­nized and all of us bun­dled into them. The road was bumpy but we were will­ing and eager bunch (to reach, HM, I mean). 

Sin­gle file cir­cle, every­one:
Our instruc­tors got us into a sin­gle file cir­cle (a term we would hear often then on). We were told the basics of the camp. No smok­ing, no drink­ing, no bad behav­iour and teas­ing other team mem­bers. Every­one lis­tened like good school children. 

The loo sit­u­a­tion:
After primer, we were off to look for the loos. A word of warn­ing here. They’re hardly there. When they decided to make peo­ple rough it out in the wild, they were seri­ous! We spot­ted 2 basic loo-like struc­tures and that was really the gist of it. No proper latches, which means that some­one needs to stand guard while you’re in there. Baths had to be taken by the well, infested with frogs (they appar­ently have med­i­c­i­nal prop­er­ties, but do we want to find out?). Not want­ing to make spec­ta­cles of our­selves, we avoided the well. Thank­fully, it poured and poured there­fore reduc­ing BO and elim­i­nated need to take a bath.

Water, water every­where:
By noon, we were in the water. Manu and Gana­p­athi, our guides, gave us lessons in stay­ing afloat. Those who did not know swim­ming were ini­tially hes­i­tant, but once the strength of the life jacket was proved (it kept Vasu afloat after all!) every­one got into the water. 

Mas­ter­ing the art of going straight in a cor­a­cle:
After much strug­gling, shout­ing, and loads of non­sen­si­cal fun­das (thanks to Suman), we fig­ured out how to keep the cor­a­cle mov­ing in a straight line (and for­ward!). After that, it was good fun as we cir­cled a small island, brav­ing the ele­ments (as Bunty called it). It was rather divine out there in the water. All you could see miles around is just water and hills. Fun things were done, includ­ing stay­ing afloat, jump­ing off tree branch into the water, cor­a­cling and gen­er­ally walk­ing in life jack­ets feel­ing cool. 

Sam­bar, and rice:
Lunch was served — sam­bar, rice, uniden­ti­fi­able sabji and papad. Let me tell you that food never tasted so good! Every­thing was pol­ished off in super speed. I have never ingested so much sam­bar in my life :)

More sam­bar and rice::
After a change, at about 5.00 pm we set off for our night camp­ing adven­ture. The weather was get­ting omi­nous. As soon as we reached the island, it started rain­ing. There were some valiant attempts to start a fire (with the help of someone’s AXE) but the rain was too per­sis­tent. So after a few rounds of dumb cha­rades, we started retreat­ing into the tents. Food was brought from the main­land. No brownie points for guess­ing what we had : sam­bar and rice.

The tent episode:
The thing about camp­ing is that there is really noth­ing to do except you and nature. And since we had no fire around which we could do cool things, the only option was to get inside the rather small tents. Trou­ble started at about 10.30 in the evening when it had been rain­ing con­tin­u­ously for a few hours. Bunty baba, one of the tent’s inhab­i­tants sud­denly pointed to a space under him and stated the obvi­ous, “There’s water under me!!” 

Almost all the other inhab­i­tants started singing the same tune there­after. Now, con­sid­er­ing there was a major down­pour, a state­ment like “There’s water in the tent” sounded really incred­i­ble com­ing from 4 adults, who I pre­sumed, had been exposed to the ele­ments before. Mis­taken, I was. Adel, who mean­while was ensconced in his sleep­ing bag, safely, got up exclaim­ing, “There’s water here… We need to plan this out, folks.” 

Plan this out? Heav­ens help me. I was try­ing to grab some shut eye (I was after all an expe­ri­enced camp­ing pro :-) when this stream of con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ued. Bunty even tried peep­ing into other tents to find shel­ter else­where but to no avail. 

Finally, at the end of my tether, I wailed out angrily: “What the **** ya?! What did you expect, ya? This is a CAMP, ya!!” That, folks, shut up all 4 of them so effec­tively that for the rest of the night we had rel­a­tive peace :) Except for occa­sional gasps and screams from other tents. We were too tired to care. 

The swim back:
Early morn­ing, after hav­ing recov­ered quickly from night ordeal, we set off for the main­land again. Sathish, Roopa and I decided to swim it back. The oth­ers went off in their cor­a­cles. It was really beau­ti­ful out there in the water. Miles and miles of water and there you are float­ing on your back, feel­ing like you’re in some ver­sion of Par­adise Found!

Row­ing, cap­siz­ing and get­ting boat back to shore:
After a hearty break­fast, we were back in the water, this time learn­ing how to row. I found my part­ner in Roopa and we did a rather good job in manip­u­lat­ing our boat across to the small cen­tral island. We left the boat on the side, and went back into the water. Some­where on the way, we decided to have some fun and cap­sized the boat that had Chan­der and Kripa. One prob­lem with cap­siz­ing a boat is that it’s very dif­fi­cult to get back in again! 

Chan­der in the mean­while was get­ting a lit­tle ner­vous since he couldn’t swim. And since we were quite some way from the island, water baby Roopa had to do the hon­ours and guide him to safety. Hats off to the gutsy woman (good things come in lit­tle pack­ages I say ;). I shouted my encour­age­ments all the while of course (I’m rather good at that). 

Well deserved oota, I say:
After all the fun and frolic we headed back for lunch again (sam­bar, rice, any­one?!). We had planned to walk the whole way, but since it started pour­ing cats and dogs and every­one had exhausted their dry clothes we decided to get the jeeps again. Unfor­tu­nately there was only one. One batch started off for Tal­guppa and then sent the jeep back for the sec­ond load. 

When we nearly lost Sathish:
On the way back, we caught a bus from Tal­guppa to Sagar. And then another one from Sagar. At Sagar, we were stock­ing up on our sup­plies when the bus started mov­ing. We realised that Sathish was not with us. He had devi­ated to find a med­i­cine shop. After much scream­ing and shout­ing, the con­duc­tor adding to the gen­eral melee, Sathish sur­faced. Ah, relief (did not want to lose valu­able team mem­ber, as I was to find out later).

The TT episode::
At about 8.30 pm we were all at Shi­moga sta­tion. The adven­ture was not over yet. After wolf­ing down the only edi­ble thing at the sta­tion — khara bath — for din­ner, we found out seats and set­tled in. We thought we were good for the night. We had 22 berths for 19 peo­ple. Unfor­tu­nately, the TT had other ideas. I had made the mis­take of mak­ing one of the pas­sen­gers Kripa, a female instead of a male. I never imag­ined life could be so hard!

Con­vinc­ing the TT that Kripa was a male and not a female proved to be really tough. The guy was adamant and kept point­ing at his paper, say­ing, “I want female!!” Yeah! And so does every­body else, man!

This con­tin­ued for a while. Sathish (bless him, now I realised why we couldn’t have left him behind!) patiently tried to explain to him that we had made a mis­take. I was close to stran­gling the guy myself. Finally, TT called his supe­rior. Kripa fished out his license yet one more time. Supe­rior TT seemed to be con­vinced that Kripa was all male :) Ah, what a relief that was for all of us, and espe­cially one!

The TT dis­ap­peared into the night. Relieved, I sank into my berth. I think I dreamt about water and sex change oper­a­tions. The oth­ers par­tied till 12.30 (this time we didn’t get too many com­plaints) and then at the unearthly hour of 4 am in the morn­ing, our train docked into Ban­ga­lore city junction. 

Back to busi­ness. And real­ity as they say :)

PHOTO ALBUMS

Anita
Kavitha
Adel
Kripa
Suman
Sathish
All

MORE TRIP REPORTS:

Suman’s take: Part 1 and Part 2
Kavitha on water
Adel
Arnab
Sathish

Details:
Hon­nemardu is about 2 hours from Shi­moga.
From Ban­ga­lore, you can catch the Shi­moga Express, that leaves at 11 pm from Ban­ga­lore City Junc­tion.
From Shi­moga, you need to catch the rail­bus at about 6.30 am in the morn­ing. It takes about 3 hours to reach Tal­guppa. Or you can take local buses.
From Tal­guppa, you can either trek (2 hours) or take a jeep (costs about 200–250 bucks depend­ing on your nego­ti­a­tion skills) to Hon­nemardu.
The camp is run by Adven­tur­ers and they can be con­tacted on: 91–80-23305508 or 91–80-23409712. You need to book about 2–3 weeks in advance.