Yevada? Thadiyendamol or …

How I took the song, “Climb every mountain” as my statement for the day and tried to kill myself.

The title of this blog refers to a peak in Coorg whose name loosely translates to “I am the tallest” a rather immodest name for a mountain peak which seems rather inapproachable. In fact my pal, (a football buff and sworn devotee of AC Milan and Kaka,) and myself likened it to Japp Staam, the footballer built like a Hummer, while a neighboring peak was of slender build and looked neatly approachable and cheerful.

On Friday, the 1^st of my 5 day holiday, I decided that I must go to Coorg. Once the small details of how I would get there had been worked during the course of my bibliophilic excesses on the same day and a few helpful coffees at Indian Coffee House, all I had to do was leave town.

We started y’day morning at 5:30 am from Bangalore and reached there by 11:50 after a half an hour break for breakfast at Kamat Lokaruchi at Chennapatna. While there, we also met two other groups of friends who said hello and one friendly angel, who also does double duty as the wife of a friend, promptly arranged for rooms in Coorg for us! So our acco was sorted, for a day atleast. We got to Madikeri and checked out the local spots, in our own unique way by running around, since I had missed my weekly run! I could immodestly proclaim that this must be first of sorts given the amount of curiosity we generated from localites of all ages.

During this sortie around the city, my pal also spotted that the Coorg Marathon was also due this morning. We spent a couple of hours figuring out how to register. After a lot of tracing, we found the place, but the organizers were missing!

Finally, in the context of my planning to climb the highest peak in Coorg next morning (2^nd highest in Karnataka?), I decided with a heavy heart against participating in it. A local also told us about the son of a famous Indian armyman who also runs every morning along the highway, like we were. We went to the house of the general to offer our respect and see if we could run with him, but sadly he was out of home. Hence we drove to Siddapura for a lovely drive just to see what it was like and had a nice drive thru several kilometers of estates of various sizes and spices. We also went and say Abbey Falls. Overall busy day.

In any case, I woke up this morning at around 4 am and finally went running at 5:15, but didn’t see the general. But the fact that the highway is not lit and also since I didn’t want to get bitten or hurt by some creature on the pitch dark highway prompted me to abandon my plans to run beyond 2 km into the dark highway and do laps from my hotel to the same spot. After an hour of running in this fashion, I returned to hotel and we drove to Kakkabbe for Thadiyendamol, the peak mentioned earlier.

The path to the peak is thru a private estate, (Palace Estate) and is quite steep for quite a bit of the distance. We made it to the apex in 72 min from where we parked my car. After taking a few pics and resting to soak in the spectacular view, we began our descent and completed in 68 min.

After refreshing ourselves with some water (no breakfast), we decided to return to Bangalore since we couldn’t get acco for tonight. Also had brunch at Virajpet on the way. Drove back in 5 hrs 6 mins. Not bad for a two-day vacation, eh?