Fat Man's Daughter

We had dinner in Virajpet, or Virarajendrapet, as it’s marked in my atlas. We knew it wasn’t too far from there to the base of Tadianda Mol. Our first attempt at getting directions from the restaurant folks drew a complete nought. Worse, they gave us wrong info. Can’t say I blame them, because the restaurant was also a hotel, and they were scoping us as potential patrons.

But we did get good directions from a random dude on the road, and set off to the Nalknad palace, from where the trail starts. We made it up to the detour off the main road to the palace. Too tired to press further, we just plopped our gear at the bus stand and nodded off.

We started early next morning, and after a few wrong turns through endless coffee estates, we eventually found the palace. A quick wash in the stream and we hit the trail. The palace was 6km from the top. We started trekking at about 8:30 AM.

This snap was taken quite close to the trail head. I’ve rarely seen sights like these. Very magnificent.

We took a small break at a coffee plantation enroute. Ujjal decided to get the folks there to make us some ultra-fresh coffee. The poor couple obliged, and concocted one of the best cups of black coffee I’ve ever had. That was a real eye opener. This snap was taken from the plantation.

Tadianda Mol is somewhere behind the cloud cover. This was the last snap I could take before all the juice ran out of the batteries.

The clouds shifted before we reached, though. We reached the top fairly fast, in a little over 2 hours. We spent a good hour and a half there taking in the fantastic view before we started back.

Now, this place Tadianda Mol is almost on the Kerala border. And the name makes no sense in Kannada, so I guessed that it was a mallu name since I knew Mol meant daughter in Mallu. I thought the place was named for someone’s daughter, but later I found out that it meant "Fat Man’s Daughter". Man that was too funny.

We didn’t see a single soul on the whole trek… almost. On the way back, there’s this hot looking babe with an SLR heading up with a guy who was obviously a driver or porter or something. She thought she was just 1km away. I told her she could expect a 3 hour trek ahead of her and it was 5km to the top from there. 15 mins later, this babe passes us in a jeep. I ask her if she gave up, and this is what she said, quote unquote: “I came here looking for something specific, but I couldn’t find it. So I’m going back.”

We reached the palace at 2:30 PM and started back for Bangalore. The route back is through Nagarhole again, and I was clipping at about 90kmph. The speed limit in the park is 30kmph. Suddenly, we see this one wild elephant at the side of the road. I brake hard, with skid marks at all. The elephant looks at us and trumpets loudly. No one wanted to stay to take snaps after that, I took off. I was in a Mahindra Jeep, but a potentially pissed elephant is no contest.

All in all, it was an entirely successful trip. We did everything we planned to do, and saw everything we wanted to see. Almost perfect, bar the trifling problem with batteries. We made it back to Bangalore late at night. My legs were killing me. Remember I’d driven 750km in 2 days, apart from the trek. What a complete trip. We got ooohs, aaahs, and one hell of an ouch!