Beginning North Indian Safari

 I was never been to north India before. Bangalore was the north most point I had ever ventured out, you believe it? And then came an opportunity. I was doing a part time MTech course from BITS, Pilani, Rajasthan. For the completion of the course I had to visit the college for a viva. For me, it was like an opportunity to visit new places. So I decided to make it a tour.

Rajasthan map: Taken from here

 Pilani is a place equidistant from Delhi and Jaipur. And we can say, these three places are in an equilateral triangle. We can visit this place either from Jaipur or Delhi. This map helped me in planning the tour.  You can see the main places in Rajasthan here.

 The viva at Pilani was scheduled on a Tuesday. I took one week leave from my office. I had around ten days. I could start from Friday evening from Bangalore. And I had to return by the next Sunday. I can make the onward journey to Delhi, and the return trip I can make from Jaipur. In between i have to spend one or two days at Pilani for viva.

 So I made the following plan after consulting some of my friends.

Adios to Wayanad

Lakkidi view point with nothing viewable

  Thus the final day at Wayanad arrived. The plan was to start to bangalore in the morning and visit some places on the way. In the last two days, rain was our biggest enemy disturbing our plans throughout. Today it turned out that there was no rain. But we had not made any plans for this day. 

After some thought, it was decided that first we should proceed to Lakkidi, which is the entrance to wayanad while coming from Calicut. You will be surprised to know that wayanad is a plateau like area situated at great height from other areas in Kerala.  The wayanad ghat pass(wayanad churam in malayalam) which starts at Thamarasseri in Calicut district and ends at Lackidi in wayanad is the connecting point between these. This pass goes through eastern ghat with around 9 hairpin bends and climbs directly up till Lakkidi. 

Karappuzha dam 

 So Lakkidi is supposed to be a very good view point over the ghat pass. Another interesting aspect about Lakkidi is that, it is the place where highest rainfall occurs in Kerala. It is quite close to the hotel we have stayed in. May be that was the reason why there was fog all the time there.

 When we reached at Lakkidi view point what we saw was only fog. There was supposed to be grand view of the pass and valley beneath. We couldn't even see things at a distance of 10 meter. We decided to go