Adithya Bhat' Space

17th November 2012 it was, the day my teammates finally decided to go on a trip; our first, and which better place than Yana. Why I say that because Yana is a perfect trek spot for starters, not too rough, tiring but has enough to make it a memorable one!

I am basically from Surathkal, Mangalore. We decided to start our journey from Udupi as that turned out to be the convinient place for most of us. The plan was to start from Udupi early morning, have a break at Maravanthe, reach Yana by afternoon and if lucky visit some falls. Distance from Udupi to Yana is approx 180km. Google maps tells you it takes 4 hours, but trust me with the rough patch of road in between, it will take more!

We had booked a 22 seater vehicle. The above pic courtesy Lancy Fernandes. The guy had bought a Nikon DSLR cam just a week back. Turned out to be pretty useful :) Even I was pretty excited to explore more with my cam, Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10.

We started off from Udupi at 8.00 AM. On the way gave a visit to the Aanegudde temple. Next stop was Maravanthe beach, where we had our breakfast. After that it was a non stop journey till the Yana. Entertainment was never a problem as we had many dancers in our group :)

We made a deviation to the left which led us to a narrower path. This deviation comes around 40kms before Sirsi.

We reached Yana base location at around 1.00 PM. Vehicle can reach upto this location which meant that was the starting point of our trekking.. yay! I noticed there weren't much shops around there. Just one, where you can get some basic materials, cold drinks and some handicraft items (expensive!).

We decided to refil our batteries before starting the trek, so had our lunch . Soon after that at around 1.30 PM, we started with our trekking. Err.. there wasn't much adventure, as it was just walking the up and down slopes! Ya that's why I had mentioned this is a trekking spot for starters :)

On the way we found some small waterfalls. Ofcourse this excited us shutterbugs which made us get some clicks.

Just 30mins of walk we started seeing the initial glimpses of the unusual rock formations. It was a magnificient sight!

From this point there onwards we had steps to climb. With the sun right on top of head, this was a bit draining.

In between we found some rock structures which were in our reach to climb.

At exactly 2.30 PM reached the Bhairaveshwara Parvatha. This is the larger of the parvatha's and the more devine one.

As you can see, the sheer size of the black sharp edged rock outcrops kept us amazed. The structure and color of these rock has been a mystery and even the science was not able to provide concrete reason how these are get those charateristics. Now that was the intersting this for me in this trip.

There is a shop there where you can find bondas (tender coconut). Ya right nobody would miss that after that dehydrating walk in the noon sun!

Above are the pics of the temple there. It is belived there is a rock formation representing Shiva. Water drips on top of that rock formation 24*7, 365 days. And the amout of water dripping is uniform throughout the year.

Then we moved into the cave inside that rock. My cam is not a well performer at low light regions, so I could not get many good clicks inside there.

Some clicks when coming out through the rock.

After a bit of relaxation, we decided to leave. So we started our return journey at around 3.30 PM.

On my way back I was not going to miss on taking some nature shots. So that's exactly what I did :)

As expected the down journey was much quicker. We reached the base location before 4.00 PM. Just one thing was missing to complete the trekking and that was the group photo :D.

We left Yana soon after that. Return journey was made fun with some interesting and err.. unseen, unusual or whatever dance performaces ;) The falls plan got dumped as we did not have enough time. We made a quick visit to Murudeshwara. It was dark already when we reached there. The place was fully lit and the huge Gopura and the Shiva statue made us dumb struck!

Overall it turned out to be a very exciting, power packed day which was badly needed by all pf us. Hope there are many more trips like these in the future.

Please do comment. I will be glad to help if you need any further info on Yana.

Thank you for reading! :)

Lucky me, there are lots of trees around my room and they make a very good place for the birds to come and rest. Atleast most of the snaps taken by me are around my house itself and a couple of them are very rare ones i must say!

I have really enjoyed Bird photography. It takes a lot of patience and very slow movements cause you cant afford to scare them off. Ya there are some that like posing ;)

Thanks to Project Noah i have identified most of the birds. Here are some of my clicks.