The Meesapulimala Trek

We were a group of six, four of my classmates and one of my childhood friends. Our trip started on the 9th of July. Everyone, except me, boarded the Alleppey Express in Chennai Central, and I joined them in Arakkonam for reasons best known to us alone! We reached Ernakulam the next day and departed to Munnar by bus the very same day. From Munnar we hired a jeep to reach Suryanelli. The jeep driver helped us in settling into rooms and telling us more about the upcoming trek. The night passed.

The first day of our trek started off with a bumpy jeep ride from Suryanelli to Kolukkumalai.

Vehicles were not allowed to go beyond this point (picture, below). We then started walking through the Kolukkumalai tea estates, which apparently are the tea estates located at the highest altitude on Earth, at about 7130 ft(2170 m) high.

We had to take frequent short breaks because of the weather and also because of the constant elevation gain.

The weather was so harsh that we weren’t able to stay on the peak for more than 15 minutes. A few selfies and a little bit of strolling later, we started to descend.

The temperature was about 5 to 8 degree Celsius. It was so cold that we couldn’t even speak properly! So much so that Arjun was completely blabbering and Nithun didn’t dare to utter a word, the whole day!

The path along which we were walking was so densely covered with grass which was about 10 feet tall, plants and trees, that we had to literally carve our way through the foliage.

During the descent, everyone was shivering so badly due to the cold weather, Irfan in particular, because he did not have a jerkin. So, I gave him mine in exchange of his sweat shirt, and then I started to shiver eventually! This, however, did not last long, as we made a fire in an abandoned building in Kolukkumalai (where I mentioned Meesapulimala starts after this point)and rested for a while before reaching our jeep to go to the camping site.

The Descend as usual was easy and fast.

The camping site was in Suryanelli. The jeep driver was waiting to take us there.We had some tea and bread omlette at the tea stall in "No vehicles beyond this point" point and then left for the camping site, which was some private land and we had to pay around 300 INR for the night.

We reached the camping site by late evening, erected tents and stayed inside them for a night, and it truly felt like the longest night of our lives! I asked my friend what time of the night it was hoping that it had already become 12A.M., but it was only 9:30P.M.!

Heavy rains and fierce winds lashed at our tents all night and after a point our tent lost the battle with the weather and started leaking! The situation had turned from worse to pathetic!

To add on to the misery, we had a few uninvited guests that night-the creepy Leeches! They were found relishing their dinner of human blood from Nithun and Kishore!

We then split into two teams. Nithun, Irfan and Arjun left to Ernakulam, and myself, Kishore and Aravind started our next adventurous, yet scary trek. This trek was from Suryanelli to Anayirankal dam, through the dense woods on the hills. We started to descend from our camping site to go to the Adhivasi settlements, through which we could reach the dense woods, a plan we made spontaneously by looking at the view from the campsite and cross referencing it with google maps.

As we went deeper into the woods, the pathways disappeared. We had to step on the trails left by the wild elephants to find our way, as the terrain was very steep. It was very scary walking through the woods, as we saw faeces of elephants all through the way and also electric fences which were installed to keep the elephants away. We consider ourselves very lucky to have not encountered any wild animal through the course of our trek! But there was still some misery in store for us, as I found a leech happily sucking out blood from my left toe. Aravind wasn’t spared either! But he managed to get rid of the leech before it could taste his blood!

Trust me, second day trek was the best but unfortunately we can't take pictures. We were so deep into the woods, and we were really thrilled. Even there, some remote lonely houses are there and they are maintaining small plantations for living.

As we walked further, we realized that we had lost track of the route and this resulted in us taking a longer route back to the dam. We walked about 30 km as we crossed 5 to 6 mountains/hills. At last, when we were finally close to the dam with just one mountain to cross, we got stuck as we didn’t know how to cross the small waterfall that was there. We were already exhausted and hence didn’t want to indulge in any kind of activity that Bear Grylls would have probably done if he was in the same situation! It was at that juncture that we realized that there was a road running a little away from where we were stranded. So, we left immediately as it was already late. We reached the road, got lift from a car, and got off at Suryanelli. From there we took a jeep to Munnar. We left to Ernakulam from Munnar by bus, and 2 other new friends also accompanied me this time-the leeches! The other 3 had already rented a room at Ernakulam and we spent the night there.

And it was at this point that the worst possible thing happened! We missed our train back to Chennai, though our room was just behind the railway station! The funniest part of this incident is that the root cause of we missing the train happens to be because of the damn ‘English’! We thought that the train was at 5:50 P.M. instead of 5:15 P.M.! The mere pronunciation of the time of the day landed us in a state of great bother! Since there were no other buses to Chennai at that time, we finally got tickets for the 12:50 A.M. Shatabdi express to Chennai! We reached Chennai by 11:50 A.M. the next morning.

This whole trek along with travel, food, on spot purchases like gloves, jerkin and raincoats, it was just 3500 INR per head (Excluding the tickets that cost an extra 7000INR that we had to book, as we missed our train).

This is by far the best trek I have ever did and I am looking forward to do a lot more!