First day first place

After refreshing up at the lodge, we set out to visit the first place of our trip and got impressed with Gowri Shankar. If you know me well you would have guessed it right. Yes, that’s the hotel where we had our lunch 🙂 For Rs.40, they provided a very good lunch in a A/C hall which was very impressive. And then we boarded the bus to visit Azhiyar dam.

This place is about 45-50 mins travel from pollachi and this dam is the primary source of water for pollachi. There is a park at the entrance of the dam where kids can have a good time. And then you climb some 100 odd steps to go to the actual dam where you can see the storage. We could actually go only till a point in the dam after which it was closed for tourists. But some people who knew the PWD guys managed to use the influence and got in. We were talking to the watchman there for about 10 mins and 5 more mins he would have accepted some money to let us in. But we decided to move away as it was getting late. There was a boating option available which again we didn’t take. Instead we decided to walk down the dam structure and do a little trek in the surrounding forest kind of setup. It was pretty decent for the given amount of time we had. We clicked some snaps here and there and it was getting dark. So we decided to wind up for the day and board the next available bus.

We were talking to the local tea shop guy enquiring about the bus timing. Actually we had to get a bus in front of the park. The bus which comes from pollachi drops people at the park and goes to one more stop further, takes a halt and starts again for the return journey to pollachi. The tea shop guy told us to board the bus when it drops people at the park itself, get a ticket till the next stop and then take the return ticket from there. We were actually thinking probably its too much to do such things and we could board the bus only when it returns. But then we just saw one bus coming fully loaded and we couldn’t even get inside. So we thoguht probably this guy is right and we crossed and were waiting for the bus from pollachi.

To our surprise, there was a huge crowd waiting there and we found that it is a practice there and we got to do the same. We got in to the next bus that came and found that the bus stopped in between to make sure every one got the ticket for that one extra stop. Imagine how much revenue govt would be making out of this concept. Anyways, we managed to get a seat till pollachi, got down at pollachi, bumped in to Gowri Shankar again, had a nice Chilli parota. We went to bed early around 9.45PM itself so that we could start early for the next day. We had planned to visit couple of falls the next day…