This post is going to be the last one in this series 🙂 . I will be writing here the general things you need to take care of, the lessons I had learnt and about the places in general.
The Leeches:
The most scaring part of the trek and the driving force to get to the peak as soon as possible 🙂 . Better carry some salt, tobacco and coconut oil with you. Tobacco and coconut oil mixture is definitely going to be of great help. What we noticed was that though the leeches might get on to you, because of the tobacco effect, they would not have enough strength to start sucking your blood and ultimately after sometime they are going to die. And salt would kill them instantaneously but you cannot apply salt on you feet and then wear shoes. That would cause blisters. So, use salt whenever a leech is stuck to the body tightly. Just a pinch of salt would do the trick. Also better to carry some clotting agent. It took quite a while and lot of efforts for the bleeding to stop.
The conclusion is that you need not worry much about the leeches…….they are not going to be too dangerous. Its only that you would be short of a few ml of blood 🙂 . And its absolutely painless when they are sucking the blood. Its just the size of them after sucking the blood that makes you paranoid.
Food during Kodachadri Trek:
The food at Santosh tea stall is good. You can get idli, upma and tea over there. Also you can get some salt here to save yourself from leeches and you can buy some orange candies as well. Food at the kodachadri peak is good. Its a nice home made food and tastes good. You can get tea/coffee, rice, sambar, rasam and curry. All this at reasonable prices. They even provide accomodation at a very nominal price. You can book a jeep to Kollur from here. Only Airtel has got network coverage at this place and that too you won’t get it all over the place. You will have to go and talk at a particular point to get decent signal quality.
Food at Kollur:
We were expecting to get some good food over here. But food at Santosh tea stall and the peak was much much better than food at this place. The strange thing is that you don’t get idly thoroughout the day. Generally whenever I go out, I prefer idlis as nothing can go wrong with it 🙂 . But at this place I was surprised to see that they don’t have idlis……. they have them only for breakfast. And then this being a temple area, we don’t even get non-veg. One of the guys was very desperate to have non-veg. So, after asking some people we came to know that there is one place some 1 – 1.5 km away from our hotel and we went there and it turned out to be a small bar 🙁 . So, atlast no non-veg…… later when we were about to catch our bus, we found someone making omlettes and that’s where we had our dinner for the day 🙂 …….two omlettes each.
Arasinagundi falls:
If at all you plan to go to Arasinagundi falls, better take a guide. That’s one thing I had learnt after our experience.
Finally, this trek had everything in it………lot of adventure, leeches, mutiny, scenic beauty of the mountains, the streams in the forest and especially the view of the mountains in the midst of clouds was awesome. On the whole it was an amazing weekend.