Oops we did it again – (K)night Riders 2.0 !!

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you…
while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Bitten by the adventure bug, gang was gungho for another adventurous sojourn. Well it was just two days before we had gone for a night drive to mysore road. As usual I was a little apprehensive in the begining, alas yaha meri kahan koi sunta hain!! Finally most of us joined in apart from the escapist Ballo rani:)

“Heaven on Earth / Unbelievable” are the usual reactions of people after seeing the pictures of Skandagiri for the first time. Mine were no different when I saw them almost a year back in one of those places to check out emails. We too decided to head to this very famous place called Skandagiri , which is 65 kms away from Bangalore. Skandagiri also has a place in history with a small fort on its top built by Tipu Sultan.

It was all planned by Mr soon to be ( hanged till death || married ) guy Durgesh.

We were a huge gang of 18 people so in all 9 bikes.It took little time to make the ends meet as people were coming from different parts of Bangalore. We started towards Skandagiri around 12:00 am from Bangalore on a windy friday night:)

 We had to pass through the newly BIAL airport in devanhalli and hence the drive was quite smooth on the 3 lane highway. In all it was another 2 hours drive with few stopages on our way.

Route: Bangalore – Devanahalli – Chikaballapur – Skandagiri. Take a left turn inside the city, follow the narrow road to reach Papagni Matt which is at the foot of Skandagiri.

I was accompanied by Pri- the sinful singer on ma bike. The deadly duo Pri aur me harassed quite a few people on our way with our preposterous yet genuine talents, Saiyad was one of those choosen ones. Why him, well there are reasons for everything.

It was around 2 am we reached near the beautiful Skandagiri mountains. We hired one guide from Kalwarahalli village at the base of Skandagiri. Forest department charges an entry fee of Rs.15 per person.

Skandagiri looked deceptively small and easy to conquer from its base. ‘Two hours,’ we were told, erred souls estimated it to be an hour’s walk:) Our guide took us through the route that first lead to the lateral part of the mountain. But it got steeper as we walked and we slowly started increasing the expected time to reach up:)

It didn’t take more than 15 minutes to realise our capacity (wow, 4 more mins) as we stopped and halted plenty of times on the way. All of us moved on grumbingly for next 2 hours with looking for the summit, but unfortunately most of times it was like a mirage, figment of our imagination.

We were accompanied by some of very talented folks around, for one it was mr galib urf saurabh srivastav, he shared and explained us some of very profound galib shayaris, well it requires quite a bit of mehnat to understand them, nah not for lazy souls like mine:)

It was one of those windy nights and with torch as our helplines we managed to reach the peak around 4 am. It was a complete black out and there came the “World hold on moment” when we reached the pinnacle. It was as if everyting stood still and we could see clouds moving around and it felt like we are on the clound number 9!!

The view from the top was heavenly and it mesmerized all of us, in a split second all the fatigue became extinct!! Well it can’t get better eating theplas – (gujju food) early 5 am in the morning on mountain top (crazy isn’t it) along with some hot tea, aha thats the gourmet way of life and some planning as well:))

After spending some time enjoying the sereneness of the place, we thought of taking some pictures but it was too late by then as appu, pri and saurabh had gone missing with the precious camera!!

There were quite a few nocturnal people around us on mountain top . Few of adventurous souls had managed to bring in tents for over night stay on mountain top with a plan to sneak in few hours of sleep. By the time we decided to start our descend we could see little bit of sunshine and the complete mountain range was visible by then. As expected the descend was quite quick with very few stops we almost made it in an hour’s time on our way back.

After taking a short breather we started on our way back to Bangalore and it was around 8 that we were back in Bangalore. Well most part of the sunday went into relaxation which was very much required after a beautiful yet tiresome night trek.

As it’s said that the secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings, watch out this space for more adventurous beginings, for endings I like fables and they do have happy endings for sure…….

Till we meet chao.

~ K ~

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