Hiking in the western ghats -- Part 1

This New Year's Eve, I decided to go away from the city & celebrate in solitude. Go hiking.

The backstory.

Having spent my college days in Delhi, I'm grateful for all the hiking experiences I've had in the Himalayas. But somehow, every trek in Bangalore had been really easy (I've done a lot of them). The toughest ones would also be like 4 hours from start to beginning and I was quite restless, in the need for a testing hike.

Ideally I wanted to go to the Himalayas itself but I did not have the luxury to take a longer break so needed to make do something locally.

I had a colleague who had told me about this "toughest" hike of South India that he had gone for, Kumara Parvatha. I also had another friend suggest me the same for as an option for a longer / overnight hike.

The Planning

Having Kumara Parvatha back of my mind, I knew I'd feel too irritated if I drove for 5 hours and only did one hike and got back. That's when I started exploring and figured there's this one Sakleshpur / Chikamagalur / Coorg belt that has like a lot of good hikes.

Technically, I found like 15 odd hikes that were practically possible, thanks to all the information on the Karnataka Eco-Tourism Department websites. (Aaranya Vihara) I put the treks I liked, in the map view here.

All treks typically needed atleast 48 hours of pre-booking (online registration & payment via Aaranya Vihara) so I can't play it by the ear. I had to plan it. After doing some shortlisting here's my tentative plan that I made:

• Leave from Bangalore: 27th December
• First hike: 28th
• 2nd hike: 29th
• 3rd hike: 30th
• 4th hike: 31st
• Leave for Bangalore: 1st Jan

Now there were 2 big constraints that I had to solve for:

• Travel time: As you can see from the map view, while the road distances are about 60-80kms from the center of the map (Sakleshpur), this is the Western Ghats so a 30kmph is a good average speed to assume.
  • To optimise for this, I kept the 2nd and 4th hikes to be not more than 2 hours drive from my stay. And I chose Sakleshpur as it was the closest to being a practical center WITHOUT requiring to stay in multiple places.
• Body recovery: If I want to do the two toughest treks of Western Ghats & Karnataka during this trip, I will need to space them out.
  • I ended up doing 4 hikes in 4 days, doing about 60kms of trek. Only the 2nd day was a bit of a relaxation, others were hectic so I didn't do much about body recovery if I have to be honest.

Here was my final trek itinerary:

Day 1: Kumara Parvatha (Pushpagiri)

Day 2: Ettina Bhuja (Ox's hump)

Day 3: Kudremukh (Horse's face)

Day 4: Bandaje Falls

As you'll see with the pictures and details online, I ended up choosing to do 2 really tough & long, 1 really long but not tough and 1 touristy one to give it a break.

Next Part:

* Pictures, Strava links, tips for each of the hike

* Review of each of the hike

* Story about the administration (or lack of), bureaucracy and more stories from the hikes