Thursday, December 25, 2008

tada tada TADA!!

Time for another one! (Honestly, this was written for another site, I just copy-pasted the same thing here :D, I know, heights of laziness).

A week full of quizzes ( that's what they call the short torturous bimonthly events at IIT), I was totally exhausted. My friends who were in another batch weren't free at this very point of my desperation to time travel into another world! Perfect timing! So, the Gods in the universe conspired and made my Swiss friend and his mates plan out a trip to Tada so that I could be invited there :D . You know when a drop of water falls on the parched earth! :D
Well ya , time to stop story-telling !
Tada is one of the less-discovered green pockets near Chennai, though most of the regular trekkers and students do know. But it is one place that still retains its natural essence owing to the physical strain involved in getting there. Well the 'there' could refer the foot of the hill/ the small crystal clear streams flowing over an assortment of pebbles / the waterfall babies flowing over rocks/ the waterfall monster breeding happily in a 10m high cliff/ the top of the hill. Our final there was the cliff.

The sojourn:
Starting off at IST-5am (IIT Standard Time ;) ) , me, Arul who I knew through my athletics team, my Swiss friend, batch-mate from IIT, and two others I didn't know until then, started off toward Velachery to Koyambedu and reached Tada at around 10 am. Tip: Being the treasurer earns you extra care and security from the rest of the team for obvious reasons ;) We chose to walk 3km on gravel and stones to reach the foot of the hill, and that's when we got talking on topics ranging from biotechnology to naxalites to Nepals' democratic developments to the optimum amount of salt in a curry. And when the leg goes pulling, the talking gets interesting , doesn't it? We were making plans on how to negotiate with the naxalites, that Markus (our SF) would be more valuable a hostage than us and so, we could easily escape in case we encountered naxalites :D!!
Thankfully the day was nowhere close to rainy as so proudly forecasted by Piyush! By now, we were walking in the streams with water so clear that we could actually drink it, and lo! I am still alive! Walking along in the stream was fun in itself, witnessing each other dork-ishly tripping into water, thanks to the extra slippery multi-colored rocks/pebbles/(not-a-geologist!) beneath.
Arul was simply great at directions, not that I bothered as to how he was employing his skill. I was too happy and content with my first endeavor with a bunch of strangers to an equally estranged place. Then we started climbing up finally. The topmost falls were now in view, but the view was so tiny it amounted to some 3 pixels on the cam :D! As we started aping forward, the rocks were now bigger and very slippery. I had torn my shoes already (Thank god! I didn wear my favourite Reeboks). Arul put fundaes on rock climbing : Three-point contact, Chimney-climbing to name a few. I got to learn what all was necessary to be brought along while trekking.
After about an hour of scampering, we reached the final destination, the cliff sheltering water from the water fall. We first hogged like crazy, keeping in mind that monkeys were eye-ing the food already! Then the usual aping around came into the pic and every one jumped into the water.
I almost drowned myself! Wow! what a start. :| My processor failed to recognise that I was already exhausted and was wearing jeans for god's sake and couldn't make myself to swim. Well, I was intelligent enough to bob up and down and wave for help. The "wave for help" was interpreted in every way but the SOS way for a long time, as I came to know later. Apparently, they felt I was saying a hi, or measuring depth of water! Argh, c'mon guys! I was pretty cool in the head, thinking I had stud swimmers around to help me out. Guess that paid off! Finally I gave up on venturing without help. Weird spiders and insects on water. People ( Markus and Arul) made some really scary dives into the water from atop the cliff! It was getting dark, time to get back. While scampering down, we collected the garbage littered along the path as an initiative to sensitise people about the issue. The pic proudly displays a collection of five bag-fulls of garbage that were eventually handed over to the security. I was officially labelled the 'chappal-collector' for god-knows-why reasons. In any case, I did justice to my title ;) and collected some 15 chappals :D.
Below is something so weird these guys tried, that its practically inexplicable.
Philosophies started pouring out of every member, now that the trek was ending. Pradeep, my Nepalese companion said that it is always there, we need to just go and get it. True.
It was then that I realised the importance of being able to live with nature, without the cozy comforts of a city life. Sometimes (all the time actually), we simply don't realise/acknowledge the fact that we are a part of nature and the skill to live in it is more fundamental than knowing how to work with Scilab or Pspice. And we simply don't give a damn to that inherent ability, the very skill that teaches us something more about life that a degree in management, for example, fails to.
Phew, that was heavy :D
Came back to campus at 10pm and wow, that was a trek each one of us enjoyed thoroughly and I got exposed to new ideologies about life, that were quite different from those of a bunch of nerds and geeks, set on to spend 4 years of their life in a 250-hectare piece of land.
PS: The pics go along with the storyline and yeah, some of them make real good wall papers.

1 comment:

Hari said...

Hey You didnt rite about the Nagala Trek...I am gonna kill you for that