Bandipur visit

We went to the Bandipur forest last weekend. It took almost a week to get things in place. I wanted to upload the pictures first, so that I can blog about it. And there were too many pictures to edit, which took a while. Now that pictures are uploaded, it's time to write about the visit.

We were six and we rented a nice car. Some of us had been there couple of times and Koushik told me that it is a good place, so I was all eager to visit Bandipur.

We started off on time on Saturday morning and we had booked the place called Bamboo banks guest house to stay. Since we started planning for this trip only on Friday, most of the well-known resorts were already booked. We got reservations in this guest house, only on one condition that we keep the manager informed about our travel status every three hours. Heh! I found that kinda amusing initially.

The drive was nice. Once we reached Bandipur, monkeys were in abundance. This fella was all ready to travel with us.



This guest house was near Mudumalai, which falls in Tamilnadu. So after we crossed the Karnataka border and drove about two kilometers, traffic police van caught us. It seems our vehicle didn't have any permit for Tamilnadu, so we had to pay a fat fine of 500 Rs. It's a privilege to be the software engineers.

:-(

The drive through the forest roads was nice. There were a lot of thick bamboo woods. Although almost all trees were bare (since it was the fall season), it was a nice view.



When we reached bamboo banks farm, it was about 3 o'clock. We had a nice lazy lunch there. Then we were showed our cottages. We stayed in the Brick house and others stayed in the Stone house. There was a play area near the cottages, which had swings. I had a nice time on the swing. At about 6 o'clock We went for a short trek in the nearby forest. The drive in the jeep was nice. I wished he would drive for some more time, but it was just 10 minutes drive. We walked through the forest for some time until we reached a small river. Ummm, all this time, the only animal we could see was a wild boar. It became dark pretty soon, so we headed back to the guest house. The rest of the day was a general fun with some nice dinner and a campfire.

We had decided to go for an early morning trek on Sunday. But unfortunately, I had a mild fever in the night, so I dropped the idea and me and Aaditya slept until late. We all were hoping to see at least elephants, if not tigers. I felt bad for missing the trek. But when they came back, we had a good laugh about the whole thing. They were led by some local shepherd, and he tried to make them walk through the thorny bushes (may be to give it a feel of jungle trek). After a while they figured it out, so he was the only one who used to go through the thorns. LOL. And all this time he was making sure that they walk kinda parallel to the road, since they could clearly hear honking of vehicles passing by. He herded them like his usual cattle for some time until they were caught. The trek through the forest are banned now. So the gang was caught by the forest officers and they were sent back. Gah! It was a tour full of getting-caught every now and then. I think we should have chosen for the safari instead.

But the stay in the resort was nice. We had a looooong and nice brunch and left the place at about 1 o'clock. We decided to visit Ooty, since it was nearby. I bought loads of chocolates and some nice flower plants (which are doing fine). When we headed back, we saw this on the roads of Bandipur forest.