Originally posted here on June 15th, 2007
Trekking is not exactly my idea of fun. Being under the hot summer sun even less so. And if you ask me about trekking when the summer is at its peak, the less said the better. So it was not surprising that I wasn't particularly enthused about scaling the rocky hill at Sivaganga at around 10 in the morning. But then again, we didn't travel 50 kms from Bangalore to sit under a tree. So I climbed on.
We had started from Bangalore at around 8:30 am. There were eight of us, Guru, Rakesh, Bharath, Sandeep, Umakanth, Syed, Ravi and myself, on four bikes. Going on bikes was primarily Rakesh and Bharath's suggestion. After a drive of about 90-100 minutes we reached Sivaganga, which is basically a rocky hill with a temple at its foot. We went to the temple before starting on our ascent. An interesting thing some of us saw in the temple was a tunnel built by KempeGowda, which supposedly goes all the way to Bangalore.
Coming back to the climb, Rakesh and Bharath were the first ones to reach the top (which was surprising, considering that Bharath had been the most vocal opponent of our earlier plans to go trekking), followed by Ravi and Guru(who was trying his best to convince the rest of us not to give up). Sandeep, Syed and myselft were the last to reach.
On the way we braved thorny bushes, slippery dirt tracks, extremely steep stairs and some really aggressive and menacing monkeys. In fact, one monkey systematically checked the trousers packets of a man before escaping with the poor guy's cellphone. Could you imagine, the monkeys seemed so dangerous that even Syed was scared of them !!!
Reaching the top felt nice. We could see for miles all around. If the weather wasn't so hot, it would have been even better. After clicking some pics, we started to climb down, where Umakanth was waiting for us. Some distance before the top of the hill is a really nice rocky place with lot of huge boulders all around. The view from here seems to be better than from the top. If we had had some more time on our hands, this is where we may have sat and chatted for a while.
On the drive from Sivaganga to Nandi Hills, Guru chose the wrong moment to do what he probably thought was the right thing. Maybe fed up with Bharath's resolve not to cross a speed of 50-55 kmph, he tried to tease him by speeding past him at more than 80 kmph. But just when he zoomed out of our sight, we decided to stop for lunch and the poor guy had to come all the way back.
It was evening by the time we reached the foot of Nandi Hills and started the ascent. This was a lot more fun than the climb in the morning as we could go on our bikes, it was a lot cooler than in the morning and the view from the curving, hill road was also good. By the time we reached the top it was already dark. In fact, it had got so late that we did not even have the time to sit for sometime and relish the beauty of the place.
Nandi Hills seemed to be heavily commercialized, with lot of hotels and eateries around, but then that is the case with all tourist places in India. But what was bad was that there was not a single dustbin anywhere on the hill and you could see the mess created by tourists all over the hills. Neither was there any street lights along any of the roads, making driving on the hill roads somewhat of a hazard. One reason for the pathetic maintenance (or the lack of it) could be that the entry fee is only Rs. 3. But I think tourists coming all the way from Bangalore wouldn't mind paying a little extra, say Rs. 10, if it gave them better facilities and made Nandi Hills a better, safer and cleaner place.Current Location: Bangalore
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