Trekking and Flying and Floating
If you remember many months ago I said I would NEVER again take the over night sleeper bus. Yep you guessed right. I once again took the overnight sleepless bus.
I arrived in Sirsi about 7am and we went to the village clinic for the day. Nothing that special there, except that once again I spent the night a further 40km deep into the forest/jungle.
We set off at 8am and headed out of the farm deep into the forest following the river down stream. When I say trek, it's not really a trek. No one comes here except for a few local fishermen to make a catch for their families. Once we had joined the main river we had to hack our way down through the jungle and climb down the waterfall. This is where I made my first mistake. Because the rocks were so slippy I had to remove my shoes and I dropped them and got my socks wet.
Pretty soon I was walking bare foot across the boulders as we worked a further 3 km up river. This was fine for the first 2km until the sun heated the rocks so hot that I had to walk along the river bank until I was forced by the biting ants to put my shoes on. Soon after this I was numb to everything from the shin down and could enjoy the view as we approached the first dramatic waterfall
Yes, finally some sign of civilization. The I began to wonder. Is dropping a can of kingfisher really bad for the environment? Does dropping a plastic bag effect the animals? Well here deep in the wilderness it surly can not be bad. Who cares?
I think we sometimes mix up environmental pollution for ugliness. I'm sure that decaying plastic bags and metal cans don't "offend" the bears and elephants and ants. Perhaps the sun was playing tricks on me? Perhaps I was dehydrated I clearly had too much time to think about some bloody old can of lager. I decided to stop and pen my protest about environmental pollution by carving my thoughts into a 300 year old tree trunk with my Swiss army knife. We finally made the top track where there is a viewing point for tourist over the main falls. My feet were killing me, I had blisters, cuts, bites and bruises; I was dehydrated and generally looked like death, but strangely felt pretty great after the experience which lasted some 8hrs.
That night I thought I would be able to sleep in the coffin like bed on the bus. I was wrong.
Lee got his first Indian haircut (about 30p including 100% tip). The next day we took a 3hr taxi back to Varkala before heading back to Trivandrum for the night. At this point I took the night train over land on my journey back to Bangalore via Oooty the mountain hill station and Mysore as Dan and Lee took their flight to Delhi to see the Taj Mahal in Agra. They land back in Bangalore tonight.
Tomorrow is their last night and we'll hit the town and try not to get arrested.
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