The Trip to Kuntala Waterfall

I read about the Kuntala waterfalls near Nirmal more than a year back in some travel communities on Orkut and wanted to visit it since then. The time had finally come. The planning happened 3 weeks back but we were not sure if will happen even 3 days before the weekend. I was not well during the starting of the weekend but I wanted to go for this trip badly. So I somehow managed to get well before the weekend. We had a short meeting on Friday during tea and decided that we would meet at the station and 5.30 the next morning. I made it clear that if we cannot meet by 5.30, we are not going for the trip. I was the last one to arrive at the station :) and we finally managed to leave at exactly 6am. The Secunderabad station is not a good place to meet before a trip since it was so crowded and no place even to park the car. Though I have travelled on the Medchal road many times before, I still don’t know how to reach there from Paradise since I don’t go to the northern parts of the city that much. The roads of the cantonment area, Bowenpally, Sainik Puri and Alwal are like a maze to me. After backtracking a few wrong turns, we hit the Medchal road, NH7 to Nagpur at around 6.20 admiring the sunrise on our way. The roads were still empty, and nice (atleast some stretches of it) so we covered a lot in the first 1.5 hrs. The swiftie handled well fully loaded and gobbled up miles after miles of blacktop. We stopped at a place 100 kms from Hyd to have some breakfast. To our disappointment, we could not get dosa’s. We had to satisfy ourselves with idlies and some tea. We hit the road again but stopped soon for out first pisstop.

The highway had many detours and bad shoulder roads as there is some heavy highway construction going on. We drove nonstop for another 2 hrs. Just before Nirmal town, we saw a board of the Sriram Sagar Project (also known as Pochampad reservoir) and decided to pay a visit. It is around 2 kms inside from the highway. The narrow tar road was neat and welcoming but with really big speed bumps, one which scraped the bottom of my swiftie. After a quick stop and check, we headed forward. The big embankment had a nice curved road leading to the top of it (much bigger than the Singur Dam). We reached the top and were speechless. The reservoir was very HUGE with its peripheries not visible to the naked eye. There were some tiny islands visible near the horizon though. Its foundation stone laid by Jawaharlal Nehru. It is a dam on the Godavari River and provides water to most of the telangana region of AP. The sight was marvellous and out came the cameras. Even though it was very hot and sunny, the cool breeze was very pleasant. We walked till the gates but entry on the dam was restricted.

After few photos and enjoying the cool breeze, we were back on the highway after an hour and headed towards Nirmal.

Nirmal is a small town on the NH7 in the Adilabad district. This place is famous for its wooden toys. Hunger pangs had returned so we decided to a stop for some food. We drove till the end of the town looking for a nice eating place but there were none. So we headed back again to an Udipi tiffin center which looked decent. We finally got to eat some nice Dosa and Puri and also some double sweetened tea. Our initial plan was to visit all the places near Nirmal all day, stay back overnight and start back to Hyderabad the next day morning. But during b’fast we decided that if we are done with everything by 5pm, we would leave the same evening and be back to Hyderabad by night. I was also ready for it because the one way 210 kms journey was not that tiring. The only problem was that I was the only person who could drive in the group.

Anyvow, after a nice breakfast, we headed to the Pochera waterfall which was around 35 kms from Nirmal town. Once out of the town, we were surrounded by cool forest area and a ghat section road but the road was in such a horrible condition that all the fun and excitement of driving on a ghat road just vanished. Lots of heavy trucks for the highway construction activities made it even worst. But I was excited to spot a few Volvo and MAN tippers and trucks. I felt happy that even the trucking industry is on the move :)

The waterfall is 10 kms away from the highway. The tourism department has done some construction work near - landscaping, statues, hedges and plantation etc. It somehow didn’t look that good. We headed a few steps down towards the waterfalls. It wasn’t big and the water wasn’t clean. There were concrete steps leading towards the water. Some parts of it looked artificial. Like a little part of rock cut on purpose to create a smaller waterfall which fell into a man-made tank at the side. It wasn’t that impressive but was fun. The photo sessions began and I got an opportunity to stretch and sit under the shade of the rocks.




They were actually trying to catch some fish with their hands :)

We were here for around 45 mins and headed to the much bigger Kuntala falls. This one too was far inside from the main highway. The road was narrow with green paddy and jowar fields at both the sides.


The road then swept down into the valley and towards the Kuntala village. After the village, the road got narrower and much more green with huge trees on both sides.


It ended into a parking area from where we had to walk down to the waterfalls. There were 400 steps down into the valley to reach the water. We could hear the gushing water from well above the steps. The first glimpse of it was very beautiful. We stopped at a viewpoint on the steps and admired the beauty from above.



Ajay commented that it is very small for being the highest waterfalls in AP (and also since he had been to Jog fall just a couple of weeks back). We headed down. Once we were at the foot of the waterfalls, Ajay took back his comment. It looked, big, majestic and beautiful. The sight of it made us feel that it was worth the trip.






This waterfall has a history of bad incidents so there were security guys there to see to it that people are within the limits of the falls. We anyvow went quite close and had a nice photo session. We sat there for quite some time admiring the sights and sounds.

P.S: If the persons in the above picture happen to read this blog, and want to get a copy of the picture in its original size and without the watermark, you can mail me. My id is available in my profile.

After spending more than an hour here, we decided it was time to head back. The walk up the steps 400 steps was by far the most difficult thing we did the whole trip.By the time we were back in Nirmal over that horrible ghat road, it was 5. We stopped at the same Udipi hotel, had some dosas and puris again. There was a handicrafts shop just opposite to the hotel which had the world famous Nirmal toys made out of the soft Poniki wood. We did some shopping here (man, they are expensive) and decided to head back to Hyderabad.

By the time we started our return journey, it was 6 pm. We thought of covering as much distance as we can before it became dark. We were chatting generally and listening to music. By 6.30, it got dark and the headlights headache started. Driving in the night on the highways is such a horrifying experience. And added to it, the horrible road condition made it even worst. Most of the drivers don’t care to dip especially the bus drivers and city car drivers (majority of the city drivers don’t even what it means to dip lights at night). But this wasn’t new to me so there was nothing much to complaint. As we were driving, the Chevrolet Tavera which we spotted at the waterfall came in sight and we all got excited again :)

The next 2 hours were spent discussing about about movies, red and blue colors and lots of overtaking jugalbandi with the tavera on the night highway. We were stopped once at a police checkpost since it was a naxalite area but no checking happened maybe because we didn’t look like naxalites. We drove till 8.30 nonstop and it was high time we stopped. I badly needed to stretch. We stopped before Kamareddy and here is where we lost track of the Tavera. Tierdness and fatigue was starting to creep in and so was hunger. We decided to stop at the next Dhaba for dinner. The next dhaba came at 9 pm just before Tupran around 55 kms from Hyderabad. I had hardly slept for 4 hrs the previous night and got up at 4.30 in the morning so I was so sleepy by now that I could hardly stand up at the dhaba. People were looking at me with concern. So I decided I had to do something to get rid of the sleep. I went out in the cool breeze till the food arrived. A few phone calls, a walk under the night sky and a very tasty chicken curry along with tandoori naan did the trick. To top it off, a big cup of masala tea and I was back to normal. We started off towards Hyderabad at around 10.30.

The traffic heading towards Hyderabad was very less when compared to the oncoming traffic which meant continuous bright headlight glare. After 30 mins of driving, the tea effect vanished and I was yawning continuously and trying hard to keep my eyes open. Ajay sitting beside me was trying very hard not to fall asleep by doing some neck exercises and head banging. The other occupants were sliping in and out of sleep continuously. We finally entered the city limits at around 11.30. I dropped off Ajay, Anand and Deepak at Paradise, Kranthi at Patny and headed home. There was lots of police checkings happening since it was Saturday night and I wanted to avoid them since I was not even in a position to speak. So I took the Musheerabad road back home. After 18 hrs of nearly non-stop driving and 550 kms later, I fell on my bed at 12.30 like a log and got up today morning at 11 am.

Overall the trip was very exciting. The Sriram Sagar project and the Kuntala falls were worth the trip. This was my longest solo driving till date on a single day. Though I have travelled long distance by road before, there was always another person to take over the driving after a few hours. The swifie was amazing. Even with 5 adults, some luggage and the AC in full speed, it easily touched 120 without a sweat and did not loose its composure on the road. I am sure it would have gone much higher. I tried to calculate the mileage and I guess it was close to 15 though not accurate. It is more than what I had expected and I very happy about it. The only problem is that the stiff suspensions make the ride a bit bumpy on bad roads. But on smooth road, it was like gliding on clouds. The stiff suspensions have the advantage of high speed stability and good cornering. Even driving for 2 hrs without stopping was not that tiring. I loved every bit of the driving. All I could say after the end of the journey was – wow!!! what a trip and what a car !!!!!

TRIP INFO:
Place: Kuntala waterfall, Pochera waterfall, Sriram Sagar Project. Nirmal, Adilabad District, Andhra Pradesh, India
Distance: Nirmal – 210 kms from Hydearbad.
Waterfall – 25 – 40 kms from Nirmal
Route: NH7 – Nagpur Highway from Hydearbad
Paradise, Bowenpally, Medchal road – Medchal – Tupran – Kamareddi – Armur – Nirmal.
Road Condition: BAD. Lots of detours onto kacha shoulder roads because of construction work happening on the highway.
Car: Maruti Suzuki Swift Zxi , June 2008.

To signoff, here is the pic of the poniki wood deer heads I bought for mom from Nirmal. Arent are beautiful?

~ciao
NK

Update: Many people are asking me how to post comments. All you have to do is click on the little blue link below which says 'x comments' and blabber away to glory :)

Long Time, No Post

Yes, it has been a very long time since I have updated this page. Lots of things happened in this span of 3 months. Heavy rains in Hyderabad, a trip to Delhi, a miserable salary hike, few good and a bad movie, a satisfying run, lots of driving, and the most important of all – shift in the project which is now taking up most of my day( and nights) with time left only to sleep. The last couple of weeks have been less hectic than the usual 13-16 hrs at office.

On 11th July this year, I completed 3 years in my company. 3 successful years in the renowned IT industry. I still remember the first day. We were a bunch of young kids freshly out of college walking into a big hall of a semi-constructed MKD office with dark leaky corridors. With ambitious dreams in our eyes and raw energy, we were raring to join the rat race along with scores of other rodents ;) When I look back at those 3 years now, I realised that it hasn’t been that bad after all. Though the initial one year wasn’t good with a perv-psycho for a manager, lots of dirty politics and plain shit work, the start of second year changed it all. A new project and an onsite assignment within 2 months was more than I had asked for. The next 15 months in Finland were one of the best days of my life – got to visit some amazing places, made very good friends, experienced extreme climates and divine natural beauty - Mother Nature in its purest form (which I am sure I won’t experience again). Working at MDP after coming back is now less frustrating :)

I recently had a first hand experience of the BPO industry when I visited Delhi to give training to a few call center people for some project requirement. Even they have strict norms to follow, even the have to undergo trainings before joining projects. I came across a few of them who are technically very sound and take extra effort to do background tech readings etc. But they have strict working hours which they don’t violate, unlike out flexible one which can range from 8 to 16 hrs. And one more thing I found is that they are usually loud people, maybe not all but most of them. A small cafeteria with hardly 10 people sounded like a fist market!!! And also this was the first time I visited the new Hyderabad International airport. Man, its just superb, amazing, sexy to say the least (I have a limited superlative vocabulary ;) ). It is of top international standards and no doubt the best we have in the country currently. It reminded me of the Helsinki Vantaa airport. The same cleanliness, the same silence, devoid of the maddening crowd generally found at an Indian airport. I just hope they maintain the quality in the long run.

Talking about Hyderabad, the traffic and road condition in the city is getting worst day by day. If the congress government comes into power again this time, I am sure the city will be back to the stone ages. Most of the roads in the city are in a bad state and the authorities are waiting for the monsoon to end to start the repair work. Luckily for them, the monsoon doesn’t want to go away that early this time. Most of the thook-polish patch work done gets eroded once it rains the next evening. Driving is becoming a pain in the wrong parts of the body. To get away from all this madness, I tried the MMTS for a few days. Man, it was peaceful. No pollution, no driving headache, no bad roads, no getting wet in the rain. But it has a very big problem. FREQUENCY!!! Like everything else planned by the government, the frequency of the MMTS trains is bad. No, it is outright UGLY. 1 train every hour from morning 5 to evening 9 - simple. No peak hour considerations, no lean hour considerations. 1 train every 1 hour. Its somewhat similar to the Madhapur traffic polices idea of regulating traffic flow - 10 mins of red lights and 10 mins of green lights. So if I miss the 8.10 am train, I have to wait for the 9.20 train. (oh, thats 70 mins isn’t it). So I reach office at 10.45 thanks to the brilliant idea of some nuthead to have the Hi-tech city station 4 kms away from the place it is named after. I struggled to get up early and catch the 8.10 train and reach office by 9.30 for a month (or was that only 20 days). Since healthy habits don’t stick on for much long, the routine of getting up early was soon lost in oblivion. So I was back to getting up late at 7.30 and 8 and back to the old, dusty, bumpy, muddy, chaotic roads. I wish to return back to the smooth railway tracks soon– maybe from the beginning of next month when I go get my monthly train pass renewed again :)

When the talk is about modes of travel, I could not resist from mentioning that my baby touched the 30,000 mark on its odo this month even before its 3rd birthday. Look at her, doesn’t she still look young?

I still find her beautiful in a crowded parking lot and she rides like a dream, smooth and silent (I should admin it isn’t as silent as it was when it was new, but silent when compared to other junk out there on the roads). The first time I spotted a Unicorn was in my college parking lot - a blazing red one with aftermarket bullet-hole stickers on the tank which looked very real, I just loved it. I knew I had to own that bike. My college parking lot was THE place to spot new 2 wheelers in the market and I am sure the red one was one of the firsts in the city. But then, I had to wait for more than a year to get the purchasing power to buy it (though I was still short of 4K for the auto start model and had to opt for the kick start – sounds so silly now). It was Pal’s birthday on 7th October. I slipped off from office in the afternoon. Mom and dad were away in Delhi for 3 months and I was staying alone then. I packed all the cash in a blue shoulder bag and after 30 mins, I was the proud owner of the blue babe – (now don’t ask me why I chose that odd colour, maybe Nanda Krishna can answer that ;). I went back to office that evening. It was Dandia night. We had a blast in the MDP lawns.

I was always fascinated by automobiles since I was a kid, so my senses automatically get attracted towards them. There are so many things which happen naturally to me even if I don’t make any conscious effort – like I get excited every time I drive a car model for the first time, my head starts guessing the bike model listening to its engine note, it tries to guess the car model while staring into the headlight beam, getting goose bumps every time I listen to a V8 roar etc. I am somehow more attracted to the classics - real metal, chrome and mechanics than to fibreglass plastics and microprocessor controllers. I am the kind who loves the sound and smell of the blue exhaust of a 2 stroker, whose heart skips a beat at the sight of a blue & black RXZ (with front disks), who would pay to ride a Shogun today (I was a schoolboy during the gun’s glory days, so never got to ride one. It had a tacho in those days !!!!!!), who enjoy the pull of a RX100 in 3rd gear, who likes to listen and read about the legendary RD350 (and still desperately finding an opportunity to drive one), who loves and respect the good old diesel Ambassador (my childhood dream of driving an ambassador is still not fulfilled though it came close when I drove my uncles Contessa Classic recently – another beauty of a car). I know it sounds silly to all the people who are not really tuned on to that frequency. But I am sure there are also others out there of the same tribe who are nodding their heads and smiling at themselves reading the above lines. The kind of people who have reached such stages in driving (pleasure/hysteria!!!!) where they become one with the machine – like the nerves and arteries extend into the steel of the bike and it becomes an extension of the body– when they don’t have to make any conscious efforts to drive the machine, just like you don’t when you walk or run.
OK, I am getting a little carried away now. The above paragraph was not there in my head when I sat down writing this blog. Maybe because its 2 am on a Saturday morning and I am sweating even though I have a blocked nose and a bad cold from the past 2 days. I don’t even want to read those lines again lest I end up deleting them :)

But life nowadays is so practical – I drive a soft sounding 4 stroker with a butter slab of an engine & gear box and a 1300 CC petrol hatchback with so much electricals that the doors & windows cannot be opened from inside without having the micro-chip embedded key inside the keyhole.

Ok, just one last paragraph on this topic – the Big Y’s new FZ16 is amazing. I saw the ad on the TV today evening. They boys at Yam are back, back with a bang (read R15 & now this), back to where they belong, back to ruling the roads again. For 65 grand, it’s a steal man!! (Idly bhai, this is the one for you. Please don’t delay much). And finally, the biking scene in India is hotting up. Just have to wait and watch for the response from the stables of Bajaj and the mighty Honda. I am rubbing my hands in glee. Maybe its time to sell off my blue one horned mythical creature and go for this blazing red Y beast :)

Now finally a change of topic. Many road trips coming up in the near future; at least planned for now :) - the first one being to Kuntala waterfalls next weekend. Hopefully I will recover from this cold and fever by then. There is another one planned to Nagarjuna Sagar but not yet finalized. I also plan to visit Bangalore sometime soon just for fun and to meet up with friends. Hyderabad is getting boring lately ;)

Movies Covered:
Ready (telugu) – Good and a timepass movie. Still running successfully at Shanti Narayanguda even after 3 months.
Singh is Kinng – Utter Crap. The most overhyped movie of recent times. Walked away 30 mins before the movie got over.
The Dark Knight – Good. I went with lots of expectations after seeing it overthrow The Godfather from the top slot on the IMB list. It wasn’t bad but wasn’t that great either.
Rock On – The movie was worth all the media hype unlike Singh is Kinng. The songs are not that great but the movie on the whole, the story, the acting, the theme is amazing – a good Hindi movie after a really long time.

Waiting for The Righteous Kill to hit the theatres – capturing two Gods in a single frame happens only once a decade.

Here are a few nice pic to sign off with. They were taken on an early December morning at Stockholm - “Facing the Baltic” theme. I have so many of them. The first one is under a very very big Christmas tree (which is visible at the top right corner) and the second pic is of one of the many boats and ferries lined along the Stockholm’s long sea-front. I still regret not visiting this beautiful city a second time :(

Phew, it ended up on a completely different note than what it began with. I am sure I have bored most of my regular audiences with all the motor-crap. Hopefully the next post will be a travel log with some nice waterfall and green landscape pics.
Flowerpot will be satisfied with this post. She has been pestering/threatening/demanding me to update my blog nearly every time we talk :)

Ciao
~NK