Tada, 12th April

after that coimbatore trip with a friend, i started searching for new places to go and ways to go to those places. after googling a little, this is what i came accross SA chennai trekking group. after reading about their past treks and the experiences they had, i couldnt resist into being part of their treks. next trek was on 12th april and i got an invitation to join the trek because i had registered on the website. i was really excited as it would be my first trek ever. peter the chief organizer for most of the treks called me up to confirm the evening before about the pickup points and to check if i had any transport.
next day woke up 0400 in the morning got ready and i was at my pickup point at 0505. i was picked up by peter's scorpio at exactly 0515 as he had told me. after that we picked up few more people on the way and then stopped at koyembedu bus terminus for a few minutes meeting few other members who had come to join us for the trek on bikes and a car. not wasting much time we started heading towards tada which is about 60 kms from koyembedu bus terminus. after reaching we had breakfast consisting of idli dosa vada etc. and also we packed our lunch from the same place, about 40 idlis i think. the place where we were going to trek was still about 20 kms from tada town. the waterfall is actually known as uballamudugam falls. theres a checkpost before the parking area. apart from parking cost we also had to pay for camera. which was Rs.50 for each camera . the checkpost is just a tiny hut in the middle of no where. and we couldnt really figure out why they were charging us for cameras, probably with so little crowd coming in they ran out of ways to make money.the road from the checkpost to the parking is filled with rocks and in some places with deep sands and makes it very difficult for bikes and small cars to go through. amongst the two cars one was a santro and so we parked it near the checkpost. after reaching the parking place we parked the vehicles we distributed water bottles, and lunch which we had bought in tada when we stopped for breakfast. after that we started walking towards a path up hill. on the way we had to cross beautiful streams of crystal clear water. and at another place there was a beautiful pool deep enough to swim (but not deep enough to drown) and we spent almost an hour playing in water in the pool. after that we started climbing upstream throught the stream jumping over large rocks and finally reached a bigger deeper pool and a waterfall on top. very few people climb till the top as it takes almost an hour and half to climb till the top and requires quite a lot of energy to keep jumping over rocks and looking for way to keep going up, as there is no proper path to go up. on the waterfall at the top we had lunch and spent lots of time taking snaps. at the top there were also lots of monkeys who managed to steal few of our snacks packets and coolly opened and ate it all by themselves.

after having lunch and water we started climbing down. took us another 2 hours to come down and by 1700 we had reached the bottom at the parking place. on the way back we stopped in tada to quench our thirsts with some juice and cold drinks, and kept driving back to chennai. reached chennai at around 0800 after getting stuck in traffic while entering chennai. and so here it was my first trekking experience with a trekking group. i jus wish i had googled it earlier so not to have missed earlier treks to beautiful places where they have been before. but i'm pretty sure i'm not gonna miss future treks if i'm in chennai.

do visit www.ChennaiTrekkers.org for more info and registering yourself on the site and becoming part of the coolest trekking group in chennai.


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