Nagalapuram- Sep'08

Nagalapuram is my third stint with CTC...it was the best one day trek i ever been.

Organised by Balaji ( the best dude in ctc.. u can expect a post abt him soon..lol) ...its a huge hill range and it has become Home away from Home for Ctc.. Before i started off my mom said..""thats a beautiful place , i had been there during my childhood"". now i ve got a chance to visit the place where my mom had been many years before. Having this in mind i reached Tidel at 4.45 on September 6th (saturday). 

 We  headed to Nagalapuram hills from chennai at 5 am.. Reached the Dam near the hills around 9 am..started our walk towards the forest.. The way was awesome with small trails..thorny bushes and greenery everywhere..we reached a spot where there was a crystal clear water. Will i ever get to see such a thing in chennai..(???) i found a tree near that small stream..seems like it was burnt intensively.. Ram explains, saying its a burning tree and it was burning for almost a week. (strange isnt it) . 

We headed towards a pool which needed some climbing on the rocks.we hit small stream with a small water fall.. All the co trekkers started to dive in..i aint a swimmer so i was thinking hw to go to the water fall..u ve to swim across to reach there.. Herez wher Peter comes to rescue..He took me there near the fall..Got a free head massage by sitting under the falls.. The force of the water was amazing..And i even got on top of the rock where the falls starts...and slept on the stream..Man it was so awesome...the water was so refreshing. 

Then we headed back to another pool and the falls where we had our yummy lunch.. the dip in the previous pool and the walk made me feel so hungry.. the pooris and idlies had never tasted that good. We filled our water bottles there and started to climb uphill.. Now i could feel the tiredness. We kept climbing and climbing and climbing. The sun was scorching.. atlast we reached the 600m local peak. The view from the top was awesome. 

Then we started to descend.. Thats when the twist comes... Our very own GPS stopped working. Peter tried some ways with it. bt it refused to. So here we are finding our way out with human intuition. And wat thats wat cTC is best at. :) Peter, Ram and Shubro took the lead to find out the way.. 

We crossed many streams... The stream was so deep and non swimmers like me had to seek help of the swimmers. We did cross with the help of ropes...   We even made human chains in the streams to make ppl and the backpacks cross the stream...

The journey went on....we kept climbing, descending, Crossing the stream, swimming..with no idea where we are heading too...at one point we crossed huge boulders...and rock wall on either side..it was amazing view..and it still runs through my mind.. We had crossed 7 pools .

The darkness started to set in...but the guys were amazing to find the trail..We still trekked towards the base camp.. and i really enjoyed night trekking..:) 

Atlast we hit the base at 10.00 Pm.. and  realised we had trekked for 15 hrs continuosly - which is the longest of one day treks... My legs started getting stiff and started to hurt badly..There was a gr8 relief when we hit the base camp. we dumped ourselves in Peter's car and headed back to chennai.. No one could actually drive.. We stopped the car on the road side for a short nap..and vivek took hold of Peter's scorpio..and he was good at driving..[:)].  We reached chennai at 3 am on Sunday.. I wish i cud have stayed on there @ Nagala..The memories still lingers in my mind..Wish i cud do it again..( when ctc went there again i cudnt be part of it..:( ..)