Climbing the mountain is optional getting down is mandatory

Date: 09th and 10th March 2019 Whenever I drove over north of my house towards Chikkabalapura and beyond, I always had a question, whats inside the hill ranges that lies to the east of Bagepalli town. I was invited by our civil engineer and construction partner Mr. Venkataramana many times to witness the development of a temple on a small hillock at his village Nallasanampalli. This time he had a concrete work for staircase that provides steps to the temple structure and called me for a visit, I took the maps and other forest department information to learn more on the geography and wildlife of this area and identify a suitable place for camping and small hike. Bagepalli taluk of Chikkaballapura district had a history of rulers related to Vijayanagara Empire and Tippu sultan that gave details of place called Gummanayaka Palya and a fort in it. Seeing on the maps, I could locate the Gummanayaka fort with difficulty and found that most of the North, West and South portion surrounding ...

Darkness in jungle gives endless imaginations mostly unwanted and less enjoyable ones. Sitting on a safe hideout that I presumed in day light started turning to an unsafe feel with every minute passing slowly. I was anxiously waiting for the moon to come out of the sky above me that was totally dark and making it a less interesting ambience around me. Time passed from seconds to minutes  and then to hours, but there  was no sign of moon or even stars in the sky. The fireflies moving around were the only ones that gave me good feel of some thing i could trust upon. Such was the uncomfortable anxious moments set by the darkness in jungle and not even in my wild imagination, I expected to rely on a light from fireflies to see the things around. Sami Eri lake is in Aiyur reserve forest region which has a forest department watch tower to its north by few hundred metres. The lake originally called swami yeri (god on bund), over period of time must have got the simplified name...

Nice Cloudy breeze with countable number of people around gave me a shock whether we will turn out for trek at the start of the day. Luckily, fair number people arrived and we decided to go in two buses. The buses hit the Tumkur NH around 8 AM. and we had nice breakfast enroute at Kamath hotel. After all those infantile kind of games and dances in the bus, we reached Siddarabetta base at around 11:30 AM. Sunand (organiser of the event) made briefing about the day's activities and we started the trek around 12:00 p.m lead by two local guides (Ram Murthy). The group was a mixture of people ranging from early 20s to late 40s. Trek started of with Sun trying to peep through the clouds every now and then. There was lot of greenery around, mostly consisted of bushes and tall grass. Initially we were divided into three groups(called ropes and lead by instructors), but soon the ropes were split and the people formed the groups according to their hiking pace. The trek route gradually broke ...

" Its a nice feel after the completion of Ganesha festival and procession for which we (Myself, Hemanth, Prapulla, Satish, Ravi, Das, Shreyas, Pradeep, Sudakar, Niranjan, Jayashima and Many more) strived for weeks together.I recollect the moments when we celebrated our first Ganeshothsava way back Sept-1994. We were all young lads of age around 10 yrs+ collected 2,5 or 10 bucks from elders in our neighborhood and kept Ganesha idol in my house Garage. Fourteen years have gone, but the enthu has been ever increasing. Every year we have a new theme, with new concept for decoration at the Ganesha chaturthi. From first year to seventh year, our theme and decoration was limited to some nice backdrop cloths or bedspreads taken from close people (Known residents of Sahakaranagar) and we used to decorate it with color papers, fancy items etc. But from 8th year celebrations, our maturity levels had changed and we became more creative in thinking, organizing and executing. 8th year, Ganesha...