TADA

"The machine that you sit on tells the rest of the world where you stand!" - Harley Davidson - Live by it!

Day started early at 5.30 AM. Got ready for what was an absolutely fantabulous day! Rode outta home at 6.45AM and met the guys, Arul and AT. Surprisingly, they were on time! Ah! What a pleasant surprise!

Here is what is getting off on the wrong foot means... Picked up food at a small road side hotel. While heading back to the bike, I twisted my ankle when I got off the pedestrian platform. Twisted pretty bad! And, it wasn't gonna subside for the rest of the trip!

Decided to put the bad stuff behind us and took off on our two wheeled macho machines! Mr. Sun was surprisingly nice to us, blessing us with tender warmth, when we were expecting the scorcher of the mid - April sun! Touched a 113kmph with pillion. some pics to start off with!



NH5 is one helluva ride! Took the left turn after Gummidipoondi towards Varadiah Palam (pronounced as Varadayyah). After this little village, over a bridge ( barely one) took another left towards Ubbalamadugu falls (a.k.a. TADA FALLS) . I must say that the roods upto this point were absolutely spectacular! (Why can't L&T lay all Indian Roads!?!?!?) After the 70Km to Tada and the 10 Km to Varadaiah Palam, we rode another 2-3Km to reach our destination.

It is this last leg of the ride that is so torturous that you wonder if it is even worth getting there! (and, I am not too sure if ma babe was made to take that kinda beating). There was literally no road! A pathway for vehicles maybe, no road! A pathway that alternated between stretches of large rocks the size of footballs and stretches of beach sand. This I presume is their way of preserving the pristine untouched nature of the place!


So we finally get there after putting are machines to the miseries of wicked ideas of unkept pathways (NOT ROADS!). Parked our bike at the Parking Lot, the farthest point upto which you can take your motor vehicle to. Photo Session!



Arul had done some homework before we left... He learnt from wikimapia and some other blogs of the distances between base camps and the way to the falls! Though it came in handy for a while, we didn't know which way to go beyond a certain point. Luckily there was this other group that called Ubbalamadugu Falls a frequent haunt. We simply followed them through for the rest of the distance.

From the parking lot, we walked some 100 odd metres and got to Base Camp 1. The fastest leg of the trek! With no patience for a break, we kept moving on when most would've stopped to relax after the long ride. Next was 1.5 Km walk through a reasonably defined pathway to the Sivalayam Temple, Base Camp 2. No stop here either! We were told to rest here and muster up as much strength as possible for what was to come. The arrogant trio paid no heed to no warning! Kept moving and in the process, overtaking a big bunch of fellow trekkers to get some sorta weird undisclosed "kick" by getting ahead of them!

Little did we know what we were to expect beyond the next hedge. To start off with, some reasonably formidable verticals that we scaled easily, thanks to some intelligent guy who had left this nice branch of a tree that was easy to climb!



Needless to say, we were really proud of ourselves for getting over that one! We thought that the worst was behind us. Boy, were we wrong! Less than 100 m down, we encountered this 35 foot vertical. No lousy branch around this time. No branch could help scale a 35 foot wall. It was upto our clad feet and naked hands to carry us the distance and it was particularly difficult for me with the twisted ankle. This leg of the trek could easily be called our attempt at free climbing and it sure was intimidating, atleast to the extent of making us forget to take a pic of the vertical before going up. But we did get a shot of the view after going up. Here it is.


This picture doesn't really give you a perspective of the height that we are talking of!









Here is one that does!





Once over this cliff and a 100 m walk, we came to this lake/pond that was bound on 3 sides by vertical mountain faces 80 feet tall. The catch is, we had to swim a 100 m to the waterfall and I was the best swimmer amongst the 3 of us. Needless to mention that I could well compete for the world's worst swimmer!

Luckily, the group that had come immediately after us knew of this and brought inflatable rubber tubes to get to the waterfall! They generously lent the tube to AT and me. We swam the 100 m only to see this little trickle of water falling from a height of a mere 10 feet that was supposedly christened "Ubbalamadugu Falls". Apparently, there was supposed to be another one next to the one that we saw, falling from a height of 80 feet. Summer had dried up the big guy!

The backdrop in these two pictures shows the little pond that I have mentioned above.



Left is a picture that I really like for the expression on Arul's face. Boy what comics we are!

We had our brunch immediately after this, the stuff that we had bought before I twisted my ankle. The Sambhar packet had leaked ruining my backpack and making the most of the remaining food inedible. The Coconut Chutney had gone sour and so had Arul's milk for his cornflakes (yeah, Arul brought cornflakes for the trip!). We ate the pongal and the vada that was untouched by the rotten side-dishes and satisfied our burning hunger the best we could.

Scaling up these verticals is a lot easier than climbing down one of them, just take my word for it! Luckily we found another way that was easier than the one that we took to climb up. Easy, but not easy enough. At one particular boulder, the toe end of my right shoe got stuck in a crevice and tore away, not entirely, but just flapping below the rest of the shoe. Now I had one leg with a torn shoe and another with a twisted ankle!

Ok, I forgot to mention that the initial pathway from the parking lot is continuously intercepted by the stream of water from the Falls. Decided to take another dip. AT was the first to leave the water here cuz he was feeling very conscious of himself as he was being checked out by a bunch of drunk kids (apparently software engineers, the incredibly local dirty cheary kind :P). I was next Arul wanted to linger around for a little longer. It just so happens that after the two of us got out, the little stretch of stream became heavily populated by fishes, fishes that love Arul so much that they decided to nibble up a piece of him. Oh what a sight that was!

He was finally driven away by the fishes and we headed home, through that wretched stretch of rocks and beach sand and then the blissful highway in the gorgeous violet of dusk.

Whatever the reason, be it the exertion of the trek or the wonderful company of my 2 best pals or even masochism of a twisted ankle, I thoroughly enjoyed myself!