Mekedhatu & Chunchi Falls

Its been a long time since I have updated the blog, thou I have been regularly freaking out with friends to various places. I felt that its high time that I updated my blog with all my travel expeditions. It was in the month of October 2008 , 2 months after our trip to mysore , that we planned to go out on a one day trip to some place nearby Bangalore . I was as usual searching on the net for weekend getaways and other stuff when I came across this place called Mekedhatu near Kanakpura .

I put forward my proposal in front of my friends and in no time everyone approved of it. Later we came to know that our friends from IIIT-B were also planning to visit Mekedhatu , so we planned to meet up on the way at Kanakpura. On 18th October 2008 , we set out in 2 cars from Bangalore. Just for people who are unaware of Kanakpura , you need to reach Banashankari Bus stand and from there take the Kanakpura Main Road , if you are coming from the BTM , just cross the Jayadeva Hospital and keep coming straight , until you cross a few signals and then reach Banashankari , you will see a temple on the other side of the road , you have to take a left at that point and from there its a straight road to Kanakpura. If you are planning to pack up lunch , then Kanakpura is the last stop , after which its totally rural area but with amazing landscapes .

We reached Kanakpura and thats where we met our friends and from there we started our journey towards Sangama. In order to reach Mekedhatu , you have to reach this place called Sangama and there take a coracle to reach the other side of the bank. From there you can either trek towards Mekedhatu or you can take the old ricket rackety bus. We preferred to take the bus and we ended up at our destination in 15 min. The place we got down had a circular resting place where there were selling water ottles and cool drinks.

One has to clim down from there to reach Mekedhatu, the path down is full of rocks and without proper shoes , there is every chance that you may slip. We carefully climbed down and what met our eyes was breathtakingly amazing , there was a small gap between 2 mountains and the water was flowing underneath at full flow , the gap between the two mountains was just sufficient for a goat to jump from one side to the other , hence the name "Meke" dhatu . Meke means goat and dahtu means cross , which literally means space enough for a goat to cross.

We had photo shoot session on the rocks , we had a good time climbing up and down ,exploring the place , after about an hour everyone were tired and we all sat on the rocks watching other people roam here and there . After sometime we slowly made our way up through the rocks and reached the top. We had to wait for a few minutes for the bus to come. The path through the forest was very narrow and only one bus can fit at one point in time,so when we were coming back by bus , it so happened that the other bus had started from the other side and both the buses got stuck in the middle of the forest , then both the drivers did some jing bang and finally we were able to pass through.

We reached the banks of Sangama and took the coracles back to the place where we parked our car , we had our lunch there in an open place and started our journey to chunchi falls. We thought reaching sangama was difficult but to reach chunchi falls you need to go through small villages , and asking directions especially if you dont know kannada is very difficult , finally we managed to reach chunchi falls. We were surprised to see that , thou it said chunchi falls we were not able to look at any water falls near by. We then asked a shepherd boy and he said we had to go down by walk along a narrow path, we slowly started descending the path and after some time we were able to hear a faint sound of water gushing and after a few mor minutes trek we were able to see the falls.

We were on top of a cliff and there was a small stream which was flowing from that cliff down ,on the opposite side we could see a stream of water which was gushing down from a height. We slowly moved towards the stream which was just flowing through 2 boulders . Not much of a water fall but the location was amazing. We spent some time taking pictures and relaxing on the rocks .

After some time we started our ascend back to the top where we had parked our car and started back to bangalore.We reached bangalore by around 10 in the night.