The district of Chikmagalur is home to various trekking points, moreover Karnataka's highest peak - Mullayanagiri is also located here. In the month of October, 2018, few friends and I decided to take a trek to this lesser known peak called Rani Jhari.
So we took off from Udupi, which is my hometown, by car and drove for around 3 hours to reach our location. We started off at around 8 in the morning, but I would suggest people to leave earlier because when we reached the top of the peak, the scene looked devoid of fog and very little clouds comparatively. If you are driving from the coastal belt, maybe Udupi or from Mangalore, then you can take the route through the ghost town of Kudremukh. This ex-mining town has roads with fine views of hills and clouds on either side and we made a pitstop at Kudremukh to enjoy a glass of tea in this cafe overlooking at the tea plantations.
Kudremukh has its own trekking trail to the 2nd highest peak in Karnataka, which you can combine with if you are doing a 2 day trekking expedition.
From Kudremukh, it took around 1 hour 45 minutes to reach the start of the trail. You can take your vehicles till a point, from where you can start the trek. The total distance of the trail is around 1.5 kms. The trail at some point has various diversions and the actual path is not that clear, so you might end up at wrong places. This happened to us, and we ended up trekking for 30 minutes in the wrong route , which was filled with leaches and had to run back from this horrifying movement. This did add a bit of adventure and excitement to the overall trekking experience .
The trail is filled with lush green vegetation and tiny colourful flowers, on all sides and has some steep cuts where you will feel like you are doing a bit of mountaineering. Going in a group could be ideal as you could help each other out with these barriers. You will end up making several stops along the trail to capture these amazing frames of landscapes, if you are into photography. As the trail progresses the pathway becomes very narrow along the hillside, thus proving to be a quite dangerous if you aren't being careful.
Since we did this trek during the end of monsoon, once we reached the peak, we were welcomed with some drizzles, which made it even better and the weather turned out to be much cooler. On the top of the peak, rests an ancient fort, which is picturesque and thus we took a walk around the fort. Later, we just sat on one of the rocks, to ease ourselves from the tiring trek. The whole vibe was peaceful, and luckily there were enough clouds even though we reached the top during afternoon. And so, we decided to take more photographs and started our down trail.
As we drove past Kudremukh during sunset we were greeted with a different scene of the town. That's all folks. I definitely recommend you to do this trek, if you are in and around Chikmagalur or the coastal belt of Karnataka.
