Valparai

May 15, 2005

I know its been a while since I promised to blog about my trip to Athirapally via Valparai but I was a bit busy(cliche #1) and so couldn’t find time. Anyway, here goes.

My pals (Abraham, Anand, Karthik & Sivakumar) and I had decided to go to Ooty (cliche #2) on Saturday, the 23rd of Apr but on Friday, Abe came up with a splendid idea (????) of going to Chalakudi falls via Valparai.He reiterated that he wanted to do a circular jaunt and being the affable guys that we are, we readily accepted*.

Since Sivakumar (am not used to this, will call him Polls from now on) is from Pollachi, we decided to pick him up from his house as we had to go to Valparai thro Pollachi. Saturday dawned bright and beautiful and we left Coimbatore at 6.05,reached Pollachi around 7. Polls was kind enough to invite us to his house for tea and we had a good time there though Polls was quite keen on us leaving his house rightaway (I really thought we interacted well with his parents )

From there, we moved on to Atakatti around 8.20 which is on the way to Valparai. We had tea again in Atakatti and the tea shop owner did a favor by agreeing to take a snap of all of us together. It was time to part and we reached Valpari around 10 after a really good drive through tea and coffee estates.

Breakfast was in Valparai at a very good hotel (thats what we were told though I thought it was far from it.) After a not so quick breakfast, we left for Sholayar dam around 10.30 and reached there around 11.45. Took some pictures at the dam site and decided to move on. Till this point, the roads were navigable and our driver made it look real easy.

I feel the best part of the journey was the route from Sholayar dam to Athirapally falls and we thought we would be able to cover the 80 odd kms route in 2 hours or so. Little did we know that it was through a dense jungle with such pathetic roads (that would have seen better times) and that it would take 3.5 hrs to reach our destination but the route was by far one of the best ones I’ve ever been to. I guess the only person who became a bit tired at the end was our “able driver” in spite of us giving him an extra large helping of whatever we had carried with us to eat. Jokes apart, I felt he did a wonderful job of handling the car all by himself while the rest of us were pulling each other’s legs as usual, completely oblivious of the hardship Abe was facing.

Completely jaded, we reached Athirapally falls around 3.20 only to find that it was beginning to rain. Luckily the “Rain God” was merciful and it stopped raining in an hour or so. The falls was really a sight to behold (cliche #3) and after having left cbe at 6.00 in the morning ,we were more than jubilant to have a look at the awesome waterfall some 9 odd hours later.

Finally, it was time to leave and we left the falls around 5.20. I really dunno why Abe was a bit apprehensive about going back thro the same route though I thought it was really scenic We ceded to his request this time too* and decided to take the Thrissur, Palakkad, Cbe route and reached Cbe around 9.20 pm.

At the end of the day all of us were dog-tired but knew that we had taken one of the craziest routes to Athirapally and that was far more satisfying than anything else !

Some more pictures from this trip are available here.

* - It was more like we didn’t have a say as there was no other “able driver” to drive that far. Two of the guys didn’t even have a 2 wheeler learner’s license and the other was a bit rusty (ahem!) though he had a valid 4 wheeler license.

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