Exploring Coorg & Tadiyandamol Trek

The main objective of the trip was not visting place, but trekking. We were 5 members: me, shashi, vishwas, abhishek & rahul. We went by my car, hyundai i10, so as to make the trip as economical as possible in this recession condition :)
Started from Bangalore saturday 24th jan-09, early morning @ 5.30am. Everyone were on time except shashi(always late). We were able to reach kusahl nagar, golden temple by 12pm. After spending an hour or so, we moved to madikeri where we started hunting for lodge to stay that night as we decided to start trekking next day afternoon, and saturday we had plans of visiting some less known places in coorg. Some of the places which were there in our cart were: abbe falls, mandalpati, chettali falls.

We succeeded finally in finding a home stay for 5 of us costing 1000/- per night. @ around 4pm we started from lodge & moved to abbe falls with lots of excitement in thinking that we will have great time in taking bath and playing there till 7 in the evening. Though vishwas enlightened us that getting down to water is prohibited after some death causing incident had happened, I still had enough encouragement and enthu left. It was totally great disappointment once we get there. Finally to mitigate our disappointment, we explored near by stream and played a lot there till dark and returned to lodge.

Sunday, early morning as per plan we started moving to mandalpati. Ride in i10 in the curvy road was awesome and full of joy. 50% of the road to mandalpati was quite awesome, and the remaining was quite horrible. Mandalpati is less known place in coorg & also very less people visit this place. People can surely plan for one day trip there & camp till the night. But its too dangerous to stay there.

Reaching Nalknad palace @ 11am(not later than 12pm) was our next milestone , which in fact we were able
to achieve. After taking some snaps in Nalknad palace, we started our trek. Even though there were quite a gud number of places to park ur vehicle on trekking way, i preferred to park it near palace so that security guard can take care of it till next day morning.
Trekking path is around 8kms, and it should not take more than 4-5 hours for any trekker. It consists of 2-3kms of tar road walking, then around 2km mud path trekking, and remaining is footpath not that difficult one, hardly having some steeps.
One need to carry enough food, water, and tent for one night stay there. Once its half way through, refilling of water can be done in nearby stream


We were able to reach hill top at around 5pm(as we started @ 12.45pm). When we reached top we were almost amazed to see that there are other 2 group of people already planted tents. One groups was 6 members and other was quite hug, consisting around 20 members. We started hunting for place to put our tent, and unfortunately none of us had experience in planting tent. Finally somehow we succeeded in the activity before it was quite dark. We can see only hills all around us covered with full fog. Sunset was quite awesome to shoot in sony cybershot camera(mine). We had "mandakki" for evening snacks, and cards for sparing till late night as we were 5 people need to adjust in single large tent which had promised to accommodate only 4 people. I learned rammi and bluff card game and it was fun beating bluff masters shashi and rahul. :)

We were planning to have as little sleep as possible, but even that was getting tougher in heavy wind and cold. Finally woke up at 5.15am to catch up with sunrise. But little disappointed, as we were expecting fog and dense clouds out there. But it wasn't. Started climbing down @ 7.30am. Which too us till 9.30 to reach near palace. From there we decided to take bath @ chettali falls as it was already 2 dayz since we had last bath. :)
Chettali falls is also less visited place in coorg. Its just 12kms from nalknad palace. Which is also near to virajpet, just 12 kms. :). But water there is damn damn cold. At around 12.30pm we planned to leave to bangalore from falls. It took only 5 hours for us to reach bangalore. Finally we r done with trekking. :)
Some more snaps:


Fact sheet:
Bangalore -> Kushal Nagar= ~230kms
Kushal Nagar -> Madikeri = ~30kms
Madikeri -> Abbe falls = ~8kms
Madikeri -> Mandalpati = ~24kms
Madikeri -> Napoklu = 20kms
Napoklu -> kakkbe = 12kms
Kakkabe -> Nalknad palace = 3-5kms
Nalknad palace -> Chettali falls = 12kms
Chettali falls -> Virajpet = 12kms
Virajpet -> Bangalore = 230kms