July 31TH

11:00 p.m.

The moment we had been waiting for had arrived. Our exams were over and it was the holiday season for a month, a well deserved break for all the engineering students (especially who have given their CSDA exams). Our plans to go on a trek to escape the life on the fast lanes of the city for a few days had finally come true. It was decided that we will be going on a trek along railway tracks that lay between Donigal and Shirabagilu via Edukumeri located in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, a trekker’s dreamland.

We boarded the Semi-luxury K.S.R.T.C bus from the K.S.R.T.C. bus stand at 11:00 p.m. The ticket was booked from Bangalore to Kukke Subramanya and was priced at R.s. 159 per head. We were nine of us including me. Eight of us (me, Vipul, Pradeep, Vijay, Vinay, Karthik, Santhosh alias Kitta and Avinash) were from RVCE and one good friend, Manohar was from BMSCE.

We initially had planned to reach Kukke and start the trek from Shirabagilu to Donigal and hence had booked the tickets to Kukke but, had later decided to start the trek from Donigal side and end the trek at Shirabagilu (which later turned out to be a lucky decision) as the chances of catching a bus back to Bangalore from Kukke was better than that at Donigal. We were scheduled to reach Donigal at 4:00 a.m. and refresh at Hotel Tourist which opens at 6:00 am and then begin our journey through one of the most beautiful and also one of the riskiest (which we realized later) trekking routes of Karnataka.

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