The Savanal Forest Trek...

Friends, many of you might all ready know that I have shifted from Hyderabad to a place called Ujire (some 350kms from Bangalore) and I am working in a Laboratory that does engineering R&D, focusing on rural needs, which is partially linked to solar technologies (If interested, please read my previous posts to know more on my career shift). This post is about the forest exploration that I did along with some of my colleagues as part of my work.

Based on the recent census, the total world tiger population is around 3,500 and half of them are in India. If you look at the statistics provided by the census people, i.e. the rate at which the tiger population is reducing, I guess we may not have tigers at all in other 10 years. Incidentally, a forest that is around 15- 20 Kms from where I presently work has more than 50 tigers.

Our Lab has great interest pertaining to human-wild animals based projects for quite some time; some projects involve repelling the wild animals away from the agricultural lands, while some involve protecting them from the humans. With respect to projects related to tiger protection, our Lab has interest in providing the technology solution. Precisely, the idea is to set up a web cam that is powered by solar panels in the forest in some location which continuously captures the video and sends it to the internet (live video streaming and stuff). An alternate plan is to set up an intelligent still camera that could capture pictures at some instances and send it over to the web. I am open to discuss about the technical aspects about the project, but for now let me tell you more about our today's mini expedition.

Our expedition started at around 9:30 from some where near Ujire bus stand. By 'our', I mean Ravi (the project lead) , Akshata (engineering student - intern in the lab) and me. We had hired a jeep, which has a four wheel drive that could go on tough terrains comfortably. The jeep driver was a very friendly person by the name Venkatesh. The agenda of the expedition was to do an initial study of the forest and identify some places where the camera could possibly be placed. Before entering the forest, we filled some forms to get permission from the forest officer in Belthangady (5kms from Ujire) to visit the forest. To our advantage, Akshata's dad had once served the Savanal forest (btw that's where the tigers reside) as the forest officer, hence all the formalities concerning the entry to the forest went fairly smooth.

Savanal forest is around 10kms from Belthangady. It is part of Kudhremukh wild life sanctuary. The forest is filled with greenery and water flowing paths all the way. Considering the fact that it is a heavy rain-fall area, we were very lucky that the sky was clear and it didn't rain at all the whole day. I must say that I had a great day for learning photography. By the way, I forgot to tell you that Akshata's dad's close friend from Belthangady, Mr. Vasanth along with the forest guide, Mr. Krishnappa joined us to help us explore the forest. While talking to them we could feel that they would have roamed around the forest thousands of times. They took us to many places in the forest where the animals generally hang out, like one spot in specific is called as SirigaLa Gundi which is an amazing water falls surrounded by rocks. The height of the water falls is some thing like that of a three story building and the pond (perhaps a water basin) formed by the water falls tempts any water lovers to get in and swim, however we hadn't got extra dress hence we didn't get in. We spent more than an hour near SirigaLa gundi as the view of the water fall was totally breathtaking. Besides SirigaLa gundi we came across many other water falls as well. The water from these falls tastes so good that I feel like the water I drink daily is utterly tasteless. While exploring the forest, we could see foot prints of many animal, in few places tiger's as well which gave us good indication of their hang out places. We identified few locations where we could set up our cameras to start with. As this was planned as a day visit we didn't venture further deep into the forest, where the possibility of finding the tigers is very much high. One more encouraging thing is that some of us had mobile network in the forest as well which is a good news for us to set up communication link, though we have to set up a private wireless line of sight network till a point where there is decent internet connectivity.

The only irritating part of our trip were leeches, they just got on to our legs and sucked hell of a blood from us. Apart from that we had a fantastic trip to the forest, which ended with all six of us having a proper heavy south Indian meal at a vegetarian hotel in Belthengady.