We all were planning for a good weekend get away for quite some time now. We got an opportunity this time around and we did not want to miss it. It was one of our classmate’s wedding in Dharwad, so we planned to visit some place closer to Dharwad. We initially planned to visit Goa; we then decided to go some where else, where we could spend some quality time, with very less crowd around. Our search engines started working, after a lot of discussion we narrowed on to two locations: Shiroda – it’s a place on the border between Maharastra and Goa; and the other was Vajra falls about two hours drive from Belagavi. We were five of us Me, Jeslin, Krishna, Giri and Mallu (Mallikarjun). We had to book a cab; Jeslin took up the job of booking it. Krishna booked the tickets from Bengalooru to Dharwad and back. We reached Dharwad on 15th Feb 2008, attended the wedding, booked rooms in the resort in Shiroda over the phone ofcourse. So, we began our journey from Dharwad, all five of us were eagerly waiting for this very moment- to set off on a trip that will be remembered all of us forever. Our first destination was Shiroda.
The easiest way to get to Shiroda is via Belagavi (Belgaum) and Savanthwadi esp. because of good roads. Savantwadi is about a 100 km from Belagavi. A major part of the journey is through the ghats. It’s a good 3 hours drive from Belagavi. We started off from Dharwad at around 5pm on Friday; it took us about fifty minutes to get to Belagavi (the road I must admit is very good).
After about an hours’ drive from Belagavi, you can really sense the dew setting down in the forest which has got such an amazing essence. After traveling for a few more minutes, all our stomachs started craving for food, so we stopped at a dhaba. I was very delighted to see a dhaba amidst the forest, having supper in the jungle is a memorable experience. While this whole thought was sinking in to me, it was photo shoot time for the others. Clicking photos had already become such an obsession, if they were all celebrities, the newspapers would have made huge profit. Savanthwadi was about fifteen more kms and it was getting pretty late, so we started moving again. On reaching Savanthwadi, we started hunting for a sign board which had directions to Shiroda, unable to find any we asked a few people. One shopkeeper told us a route, he was saying something more, but our driver was in such a hurry that he just zoomed away. At a place (Kamat hotel near some lake) we should have taken a right turn, but, who listens to me, we ended up spending more than an hour and a half looking for the right road. Finally after asking a lot of people, trying out so many small roads, and a lot of calls to the resort manger we reached Dolphin Resort.
The resort was a nice place, it housed a few huts, categorized into ac, non-ac, attached bath, common bath and what not, and we took the cheapest available. The huts were pretty neat, there were cupboards and beds; I guess that’s all that we expected. We then went out to the beach, just to relax suddenly, I don’t know what struck these guys, they started building little structures with the sand, cannot expect more than that from five single guys at 1 am on a beach. After yet another photo session with these different looking structures we went back to get some sleep.
The next morning I heard a noise soon I realized it was Jeslin it was really strange of him to wake us all up for a moment I thought I over slept looked at my watch and it was only 6am. It was really good outside we then decided to take a walk along the beach. I had never seen the sea water so clear and the sand was white in colour. A good two hours later we returned back to the huts to brush and have breakfast and set out to “Dolphin Safari”. We hired a boat for Rs.700; we waited for quite sometime before we could spot any dolphins. I was really struck by the silence of the waters so silent that I could really hear the voices in my head (yeah, ok I know this is Phoebe’s dialogue). Needless to say we had another photo session and spent quite a sometime waiting for the Dolphins after giving up hope the boatman decided to head back to the shore. Just then I don’t know how he spotted a dolphin and took us to the place, they were actually Dolphins; one of them did an amazing 360 degree summersault, they were too quick for us to capture them in the camera. We then made our way back to the shores after spending over an hour and a half in the “Dolphin Safari”.
After thanking the boatmen, it was time for some real fun. We all jumped into the waters and stayed there for quite a long time, playing our stupid games before returning back to the resort for lunch. The lunch was quite ok. It was a regular meal rather a Maharastrian Meal – a little rice, dal, chapatti, a vegetable. After lunch we again went back to waters to start all over again. We later dug up a whole buried ourselves one by one in it. It was almost sun set time by then clicked a few snaps of the setting sun and returned back to our hut to take a bath and get rid of all the stuff glued to our bodies in short we made a desperate attempt to return back to civilization. It was dinner time; so we headed straight to the dinning place. Jeslin was desperate to have chicken for dinner we all including the resort manager had a good laugh over it – I mean why would anyone come to such a place and have chicken instead of fish? The dinner was pretty much the same as lunch; after which we again went out to beach, Giri and Mallu we a little high on vodka and started singing, the lyrics were quite original I must say. It was quite fun watching them yell like that. We settled the bills with the manager and informed him that we would be vacating the place at 3 am and returned back to get some sleep.
We got up at 3am in the morning, did our morning stuff packed our bags and vacated the huts, woke up the manager and left the resort. Thus began our journey to the next destination Vajra falls. We had to go to Belagavi first and from there we had to take another route to Vajra falls. The drive from Shiroda to Belagavi was pretty peaceful except for Jeslin, he seemed to have lost it completely behaving in a little weird manner; all this time when we were in Maharastra he used to converse with people like the shopkeepers and other in Kannada, once we entered Karnataka we started talking in Hindi and English. We reached Belagavi at 6:30 am or so, had breakfast in a hotel and then headed towards Vajra asking for directions. We were told to take a guide from a place called Jamboti, on reaching Jamboti we did ask a few people for a guide to take us to Vajra falls, to my surprise not many people knew about Vajra falls. So we then decided to ask in the forest department office.
The response we got from the forest department officials took us all by surprise. Had we gone into the forest without informing them, we would have had a FIR registered against us; this comes in the wake to control terrorists who are using these jungles for their training camps. We were asked to obtain permission from the forest department of Khanapur which is about 30 – 40 kms from Jamboti and also there was no guarantee that we will be given permission we did not want to waste time too. So we repeatedly requested the forest officer of Jamboti to let us go, we gave him all the usual blah of us coming from Bengalooru, etc. So after writing down a letter, stating that we will be responsible for what ever happens to us etc; so set out into the jungle, our next destination was a village Chapoli where we could take one of the villagers as guide to Vajra falls. We were driving in the jungle now, mud roads , birds chirping , dead silence after driving for about 7 – 8kms we reached to a point where our vehicle could not go any further. So we had to go walking the village was about 2kms from there. We started walking and for time pass we had our PJs; after about forty minutes or so we reached Chapoli. As we were informed we had to look for a person called Gowda (I don’t remember his first name). There was a situation now – the people there did not speak any other language other than Marathi and we did not Marathi that well. We learnt that Gowda was not there in the village, so we had to look for some other person; to our rescue came a boy who knew Hindi with his help we found a person who knew the jungle well and ofcourse knew only Marathi speaking to would be a challenge – we thought. We then began our trek towards the falls and what followed next was totally unexpected.
The trek initially was pretty usual – the usual jungle track, the trees, snakes etc. we climbed down one hill, climbed up another and climbed down only to find the downward journey was steeper. I frequently slipped giving a little scare to everyone – Imagine to climbing down a steep hill and a huge boulder of human mass weighing approximately 90 Kg rolling down the hill and taking you down. I was making a conscious effort not to slip and fall. Krishna then told me to climb down in “Ambareesh” style – the way Ambareesh (Kannada actor) used to climb down the stairs; it was pretty helpful. We then started to hear a sound of water stream flowing, we thought the falls was close by so we started moving swiftly. We reached the foot of the hill we could see a stream, the water was clean very clean and cold we drank the water rested for about five minutes, but where was the falls? I asked the guide with what ever little Marathi I knew, he said we still have to go another 3 kms; I was like where is the path? All we could see there was rocks; yes we had to go over them apparently the river during the rainy season the river water covers the whole portion. There began what seemed like and endless journey to the falls, over the rocks.
It might seem easy, add to that water making it slippery, it now seemed like a real experience of a life time. I totally lost control of myself slipping every where getting hit every where it seemed like my feet did not have any grip in them at all. I don’t know what went wrong and where. There were many places along the path where we had to cross through the water which by the way was flowing at a little force; the rocks along the way make it even scarier. I was now making a conscious effort not to slip and get hit on my head. We removed out footwear at once place and started moving again. I was moving at snails pace and every one got annoyed by my pace, I was trailing by some distance at one place I slipped and almost hit my head to one of those rocks; some how got up and got going again. We kept going and going and going we had no clue where we were when asked the guide how much far we need to go he said 2 more kms. Some one said ‘we can hear the sound of water falling I think we are close by’ and then else said ‘we have been hearing for more than 45 minutes now’.
Amidst all this, I was fighting my own battle as though what ever happened so far was not enough, there were green patches of algae, and this made me look even more miserable. This made me walk even more slower, the other guys we loosing patience, adding to this we again reached to a point where we had to cross the river again. This time it was really slippery and we all literally had to crawl through. The guide helped me out, but I almost made him loose his balance and he almost fell down. My feet were not gripping at all; we walked for almost about ten more minutes. We found a few guys swimming. They asked us our whereabouts and I must say they were quite surprised to hear we were from Bengalooru. These guys had been staying there in that place for the past three days; we were all astonished to hear it; I wondered how they kept mosquitoes away..? Thinking about all this I again hit my leg at a couple of places, but we were almost there it probably kept me going.
At the falls it was a good view, we were on the head of the falls; the water falls from there was no energy left in us to jump and shout in joy, we had to save energy and get back atleast to the vehicle in one piece. If anything happens down there, the condition would have gone worse by the time we went back. Just about fifteen minutes rest, a couple of biscuits later we were on our way back. This time the walk back was pretty smooth to say the least; we got back to the foot of the hill we had to climb to get back to the vehicle in no time actually. The water there flowed in a small stream and it was pretty cold, I drank a lot of water; I knew drinking so much water was not good as we had to make a pretty steep ascent but I was totally dehydrated; after a little while, we started our climb back.
After about ten minutes on the ascent, I was panting it made me look pretty stupid as well; I had never imagined that my stamina had gone so low. I was pretty angry with myself I never thought that I could be in such a state. Jeslin was behind me was in no good state either, he along with those heavy shoes was panting too; I was making a real conscious effort not to fall back, if that had happened you can image what would have happened to Jeslin. Other guys used to climb a lot quicker and would wait for us there as soon as we reached they used to start walking; I was realistically looking to get to the vehicle as soon as possible which at that point seemed like an year’s walk away.
We all some how got to a point where we started the trek and had to let the guide go. We paid him two hundred rupees. He was happy and asked us to come back; not for the next two years atleast I thought. Now the walk to the vehicle seemed pretty far; that is when I realized that we had good fun this trip, this was the weekend get away we were all looking forward to. We reached the vehicle and the driver was pretty upset. We had left him in the jungle with no food he was hungry and started shouting. Good sense prevailed and none of us argued with him. We started reached Jamboti and allowed the driver to eat some thing and we all had a lot of fluid. I started to get some energy, about twenty minutes later we got moving again. Our next stop was Belagavi I sat along side of the driver as all of them slept. I did not make any attempt to speak to the driver.
Once we reached Belagavi we stopped at a place to have some coconut water for the driver actually, everyone woke up and we all had coconut water. All of our batteries were recharged by now and thus began all the yelling, music in the vehicle. We all cheered for Anushree; the occasion of her marriage enabled us to plan this get away; cheered the driver; and ofcourse there was a lot of other stuff going on I am not going to mention it here. We reached Dharwad in about forty minutes. The time was exactly six o’clock in the evening just in time to board our bus to Bengalooru.
