The next place in our trip was the “Monkey Falls” near pollachi. In fact it is just 3 KMs more from the Azhiyar dam that we visited the previous day. So we set out in the same bus that took us to Azhiyar, got down at Azhiyar dam itself and decided to walk the three KMs to see if we could end up in something interesting on the way. Just about a KM from Azhiyar, there was a small place off the road where we could hear the sound of water gushing out of something at high speed.
So we jumped off the road and did a small trek over the hard rocks, spent some time out there and obviously clicked some snaps too!!
Then we walked couple of KMs more to reach the monkey falls, wondering how many monkeys would really be there and how much of trouble they would cause to us. Just in couple of minutes we reached there and understood what really those monkeys can do. It was jumping over the cars and bikes, dancing over the helmet that was locked to the bike, few small monkeys went under the cars and were playing like anything. And we assumed that the monkeys don’t do any harm to the tourists and entered in to the falls. We decided during the start of the trip itself that we wouldn’t take bath in the falls and stay away from the waters. So we decided to do things that wouldn’t get us wet. But somehow we managed to get wet…No no not by taking bath in the falls, we fell down with full style. We were clicking some snaps, while I was posing, Rukku was handling the camera. He asked me to go to the center of the falls so that he can take a better snap. I thought I was carefully keeping by feet, but just when I was about to position myself for the snap I felt something hit my head hard. Yeah I realized I fell down after hitting the hard rock. For few seconds I couldn’t even help myself getting up… There were couple of college students standing near by who gave their hands and saved me from sliding down. After standing up and coming back to normal state I was looking for this Rukku whom I thought would’ve started to come and see how I am doing. But I could see him standing at the same place and asking me to pose. I was like what the hell man? And went down to ask him if it was funny. But after I went down only I came to know that he had also fell down at the same instant when I fell down. In fact he had fell of a small cliff like thing and luckily he had his bag on the back which had saved his head hitting the ground and he was holding the camera up to save it too!! Thank god noting happened to the camera:) And then one guy came and told him, “enna sir photova indha angle laendha edukkaradhu…paarthu sir…” Ada paavingala naanga enna P.C.Sreeram-a, K.V.Anandh-a…edho memory stick ellam cheap-a irukkudhae nnu photo click panrom da…idhuvae film roll naa motha trip kkae naanga 40 photo dhaan da eduppom…If you closely observe the photo you can see the wet T-shirt…:)
After this incident my confidence with waters went really down and for the whole trip I was very hesitant towards stepping in to water, though most of the places we went were like falls, dams…After spending another hour there we decided to head straight to Tirumoorthy falls which we heard is another good falls around. So we went back to Azhiyar, had food there in some local shop and inquired about going to Tirumoorthy falls. We were told to take a bus to a intermediate place from where if we could take a bus which would go to Udumalaipettai then we could reach Tirumoorthy falls. We did the same and reached the fallls at around 3.30 types. We wasted some time in waiting for buses. Only after reaching the falls we realized that we should have come to Tirumoorthy in the morning and could have easily spent the whole day there. Just as a falls, it is only about climbing say about a KM up and reaching the top spot where there is one Panchalinga temple. And probably you can take bath here too. There were lots of sabarimala saamis who were coming back after the darshan. On the way they come here, take bath and head straight to home.
But what would make it interesting is taking the off route. Like you have steps to climb to the top, but you gotta just jump out of the parapet, step in to the hard rocks, and from there you can spend hours climbing here and there, taking the hard routes and some risks. We did things like that and there were no security guards around. So you can do anything that you would like to that makes sense to you. We did things like that and reached the top of the falls. It was definitely off season I guess otherwise there must be like a heavy gush of water from the falls. In such times these hard rocks would have been submerged in the waters. The pic is the end of the trek we did where we went down some big rocks to climb another big one…
There were only couple of buses running between this place and Pollachi it seems and we were told that if we were lucky we could get a bus at around 6.45 types. So we had to cut down the time to be spent there and got down like in 10 mins flat just to find a bus standing there and it was a bus to Pollachi. We just picked some cauliflower pakoda and went in to the bus and it starts just we sit down. We were totally happy as the first day itself went really well. Around 8.30 we were back in Pollachi and again it was Gowrishankar for dinner. We spoke to the lodge guys and told him that we need a cab to take us to Topslip the next day. He spoke to the travels guy he knew and said he has arranged for a Indica and it would come at 7 O clock itself and asked us to be ready. We were also told that only some 30 vehicles are allowed beyond Topslip and we gotta be quick in getting in there. We quite didn’t understand the funda but just made sure we went to sleep early. We were quite excited about the next day as we have heard a lot of Topslip…
Raghu's Ramblings 