Savanadurga hill trekking

It had been quite some time since I went out of the town. I had been thinking of going somewhere. I started googling for a place which can be visited over the weekend. I came across a adventure site which had mentioned couple of places which can be visited over the weekend. Based on distance and convenience I picked Savanadurga. I googled again on this place and tried to find out where exactly it was located. With this info in hand I thought of speeking to my colleagues at work. I only managed to talk to only CM(crib master Harish) who sits right opposite to my cubicle. CMH agreed for the trek without any questions. It was Saturday evening and in my mind I had planned to go next day morning itself. I wondered if my colleagues at work would agree for the trek with such a short notice. At this point of time another colleague, Chaitanya called me and told that Jaipal and Ajay are at his home, and that he wanted to invite me also to visit his home for a drink. I told him that I cannot do so, as I was not at home right now and that it would take time to reach home. By the time I reach home it would be 8:00 so I said I cannot and we disconnected the call. I managed to return to home earlier than 8:00pm and called CM, and confirmed if he was okay to visit Savanadurga, he said its fine with him. I now called CH and told him about visiting this place. I also asked him to get opinion from other two guys. Even though everyone didn't agree at the first call, with few calls between the colleagues, hurrey! we decided to go by CM's car. Me and CM decided to go to office by 7:30 and pick up the remaining three.

As decided we went to office by 7:30am but the other three guys didn't turn out on time, so we left 30 minutes late. CM was already at work, by cribbing about this. We stopped by a darshini in Magadi road and had our breakfasts. There was another round of cribbings and debate on way for the tea that we took. We started our journey towards magadi and by 9:00am we were about 15km away from magadi. We stopped for drinking tender coconut and took some rounds of photos. All this time our CM was busy cribbing AJ as always.




Before entering into magadi road we spotted a sign board mentioning the way to Savanadurga hill. We took the left turn and again after going about 20km we spotted another sign board to reach the hill. We reached foot hill by about 10. With help from locals we found out the place to park our vehicle and as soon as we stepped out of the car some boys in school uniform came running towards us. They asked us if we need any help in finding the way to the top of hill. I had read in one of blogs that it is better to take one of these boys so that we don't take the hard route to the top. So we decided to take the boys and bargained the price before only. Later we purchased water bottles as I knew that there would be no water available on top of the hill or on the way, in case if it is available it would be costly that its MRP value. We started taking some snaps before starting our trek at about 10:30.



With great enthu and the views surrounding us we started the trek. The trek started with a steep climb. After trekking for a short distance our CM suggested that he is not going any further and that he is returning back to car. We tried to convince him to come to atleast to the fort wall which was the first checkpoint. He didn't agree, and we started heading towards the first checkpoint.



Once we reached first checkpoint we enquired the boy about the distance yet to be covered. He suggested that we had come about 15%. We weren't that tired at this point of time and we could all see that we had started to sweat and it was the beginning.



At this point of time the boy told us that there is cave very near to the first checkpoint, but it was not in the way. We discussed among ourself and decided to check it out. We had to do some acrobats to reach it, but it was not actually a proper cave but there some shade from some big rocks and thats all.


We came out of it and continued our journey to the top. We started seeing more and more tiredness as we kept moving further. At times we had to crawl like using using all four limbs. Thinking that it is nothing compared to the view around us we kept moving.




We came across small water bodies collected in the rock cavities. We took some snaps here. At this point of time JA and CH started saying that they don't want come any further and told us also to do the same. We managed to convince them to move further. and started again.




Everyone including myself were completely tried and we were taking longer breaks at shorter distances. At last taking many breaks, talking and teasing each other we finally reached the top. It was very cool, it was all worth it. The view was amazing everyone took rest for about 20 minutes and all of us took snaps.

We started heading back. Going down was not as difficult as climbing up. Gravity was pulling us down we were trying to resist it. By the time we reached back to the foot hill it was about 1pm.

Everyone was so hungry that we could have two meals each :) But when we enquired, we didn't get any good hotels nearby so we thought of having at Mysore road. To our bad luck CM was our driver and he didn't let us have lunch anywhere we just had two glasses of cane juice and came back to Bangalore by 4:30pm.

All in all it was memorable trip and worth it.