Kumta to Gokarna - Organizers Way

With no much time it was our second organisers meet, after our BTC's completion of first year, it couldn't have been a better reason for all the organisers to meet and celebrate for the cause :) This time it was a beach trek from Kumta to Gokarna, as said by Viru 'less of trek and more of fun!! (Fun was there absolutely and more trek too!) 

Departure : 

Our meet up point for a change wasn't Shantala Silk house! Channa must have been grumpy about the fact that he couldn't meet Shantala this time :-P). Our bus, Rajahamsa was at 9pm at Majestic terminal 5. Most of us arrived, while Dinesh was stuck in the traffic. We tried convincing the bus conductor to wait for couple of mins but he couldn't be convinced for long and directed the driver to start. Just when the driver was turning, we saw Dinesh running to catch the bus, they got into the bus in jab we met ishtyle except that this wasn't a train :) After exchange of pleasantries we decided to sleep, we didn't want to disturb the co passengers. 

We reached Kumta, morning by 7.30. We took out our toothbrushes, facewashes and started brushing teeth, people at the bus station were looking at us like we were some sort of aliens. They were   busy waiting for their respective buses either to go to school, college or for work, our behaviour (unexpected to them) might have made them think we were crazy! We got freshened up at the station anyway and walked a bit to a hotel for our breakfast. It was a hot day, i had forgotten to carry my cap, so myself and Sush tried to manipulate Ruwise & Dinesh to lend me their cap, saying “most girls prefer tall dark handsome men so get a good tan in this hot day so you may get lucky with some foreign babe at some beach as we were hitting most of the beaches in the western coast!”  It didn't work though :) Eventually Sangamesh gave his cowboy cap later in the day, but he won't admit this was the reason :-P Santosh became the butt of all jokes! He became our group's Alok nath the Sanskar baba :-D. 

We gulped masala dosas, idly & vadas as many as we could and left the hotel after few group pics. After knowing no buses would take us to Kumta Beach, we decided to walk through the streets to reach the beach. It was an unexpected walk through the streets interacting with the locals who were more than happy to help us guide our way, vendors trying to sell us fruits & vegetables. After about half an hr we reached Kumta Beach. It was a quiet beach with hardly anyone. We stopped by, climbed few boulders and as usual, profile pic photo shoots with caps without caps, with glares without glares, with jacket without jackets, basically all possible permutations and combinations were tried :) (The next day it was with shirts without shirts and what not :) )

Since we had a long way to walk we didn't waste much time, we started walking along the shore and we had a hill to cross to continue the shore line. So it was a true 'Beach' 'Trek', walking along the beaches and then trekking the hills in between. Ruwise and Aloknath were busy chasing crabs on the shore while Sangamesh was busy running behind his cowboy hat which kept flying away every now and then by strong winds! Not that he was running and leading all of us, poor guy was running the opposite way and managed to be the last one!

Abhishek the iron man was carrying tent and shouting with exasperation that he's not carrying the   tent tomorrow :-P (Tomorrow was a different story! Scroll down to know :))

We hit a small shop; it was like finding water in desert! As our water reserves were low and the beaches that we came across were not inhabited by people we found no shops anywhere. We drank ragi water it was chilled with jaggery instead of sugar. Picked up some breads for our next day breakfast and continued our journey. 

Then came the Nirvana beach! Myself and Sush felt this beach was never ending as we walked and walked, maybe that's why it was called ‘Nirvana’ but for the guys this was called Nirvana b’coz this was the first beach where they spotted foreigners after crossing so many beaches (I don't have to give more details on what I'm referring to!) 

Suddenly their walking speed dropped, may have been that of turtles! (For the obvious reasons :-P) And they shamelessly blamed it was the hot sun and humid weather! (Can’t you have made up a slightly believable reason? :-P). Chaits had to scream and make them come back to their senses. Finally we caught up our speed and reached the end of Nirvana beach, there was Kagal fort to cross. By then it was evening, the fort top was covered with brownish dry grasslands, some thought of putting campfire right here but they didn't risk to do it! Alarming the forest cops for initiating forest fire was no way our idea! The entire beach shore view from this fort top was amazing, it was as though we were on a chopper and sunset view was icing on the cake. We didn't wait to watch complete sunset as we were exploring this way for the first time and didn't wanted to be lost midway when it was dark. Santosh-our GPS went absconding for a while when he went searching for trail. We kept mimicking all weird animal sounds and trying to reach out. Soon we could reach out to him and followed his instructions. Finally reached a small beach by 7pm  where we had decided to tent!

We began rising up the tents, others went to the nearby house, the lady was sweet enough to provide us drinking water. After a tiring day the only thought running in our minds was food and sleep. We collected dry sticks and woods and lit up campfire!  The crackling fire, the roaring sea in front of us, along with the whistling breeze could not match any other music! Our stomachs soon beat this music, so we decided to cook, nothing special, just boiling water for cup noodles! We satisfied our stomachs and then we sat around the campfire to discuss about the BTC plans for this year, feedbacks and suggestions. 

When it was almost ending, Channa was busy making a big pit, which everyone speculated it to be, his preparations for tomorrow to attend nature call! Our Aloknath threw more light on this matter saying that a better idea would be to go sit midway in the sea! We let them discuss their alternate plans :-P and crawled into our tents by 12. 

Blah Blah Day :): 

Next morning I was woken up by Sush, they just lead me to the sea without even giving me a min to stretch! The water was ice cold. I couldn't help but only option left was to splash at each other. We stayed there till we got signal from Chaits to pack up. The lady from the nearby house also provided us with hot water to freshen up! What can one ask for! After a salty bath at the sea we cleaned up ourselves with hot water! We then sat together for breakfast. No hotel would offer you that many items immediately! (Yea! Except for the breakfast buffet :)) We had cornflakes with milk, bread jam, bun pickle, chapathi with chutney powder, cup cakes and salt/glucose/cream/digestive biscuits :-P !! 

Packed our tents and bags and we began our day 2. We started by 9ish to walk, another hill to cross and after many unnamed small pristine beaches we reached Aghanashani river to reach the opposite port (Tadadi). We took a ferry to cross the river (sea?? Santosh even tasted the water to check if it was river or sea, the water tasted salty though :-D). The ferry had earlier fetched fishermen and fisherwomen, it smelt of fishes and also many rotten fishes were found inside the boat. By the time we reached the other side we were stinking like rotten fishes! To get rid of the odour we kept spraying deodorant on each other. 

Dinesh decided to take a bus to Gokarna while rest of us continued our beach trek (Probably Dinesh took that tall handsome thing too seriously and wanted to go looking for babes before others :-P) We gave away our tents happily to Dinesh to carry :-D and only Abhishek was furious that he had carried the tent all by himself the previous day :-P

After dumping our tents with him we continued, we were on the beach. It was tiring than our yesterday's trek. Maybe because it may have gotten monotonous. Soon the walk started to get interesting!We kept bumping into weird interesting and colorfully dressed foreigners, who kept greeting us when they saw us. Their doped appearance got us high! We reached paradise beach, somewhere between the hills we were stuck looking for trails. Viru went exploring, while we all sat to take a breath and went on chit chatting. We could hear somebody drumming a metal surface, trying to seek attention. In no time a huge man appeared in front of us from nowhere from the bushes! As expected it was some foreigner (looked more like an obese Mowgli, with minimum clothes on :-P)

His words of wisdom " No blah blah blah.. Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah " " Big toilet good toilet" became our group anthem till we got back to Bangalore ( I hope he wasn't trying to convey that he was constipated :-P) To escape from his gyaan, we asked him directions to Om beach and left that place immediately! 

We took a break at Om beach, had our lunch. Well there's something about this beach which brought out colors in most, like Viru became Superman (With his blue towel tied on his neck), Abhishek to Salman with his torn jeans (self torn ofcourse :)), Channa turned out to be belly dancer ( He denied to perform for us the previous night at the campfire :)) and all we girls became bandit queens with our scarves! 

We crossed Kudle beach and there was a temple before getting down to Gokarna beach. Some of us took a break here. We had almost 4hrs to spend. All the guys went to Gokarna beach, they were creating Sand art (:-P), digging their own graves!! We caught up with them after a while, played throw ball and also got to borrow cycles from few kids and took a ride on the shore :) 

By 6 we left the beach, few visited Mahabaleshwara temple. We had dinner at Pai (With awesome gudbad dessert to finish with) and took our bus to Bangalore at 7.30pm and our goodnight wishes were Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah Blaaaaaaah (Leaving the co passengers wonder if it was some sort of secret code :-P)

Beaches that we covered:

Day 1:      

1. Kumta Beach
2. Vannali Beach
3. Mangodlu Beach
4. Kadle Beach
5. Gudeangadi Beach
6. Nirvana Beach
7. Kagal Fort
8. Barka Beach

Day 2:-

1. Aghanashini River
2. Tadadi Port
3. Kelaginstala Beach
4. Belekan Beach
5. Paradise Beach
6. Half Moon Beach
7. Om Beach
8. Kudle Beach
9. Gokarna Beach

Distance: 36.6kms

Written By            : Deepthy Jagadish

Organized By        : Virander Sirohi
Organizers Count  : 11
Date of event        : 11th & 12th Jan, 2014
Place                    : Gokarna
Pictures                : BTC Facebook Album