Trip to Coorg: Visit to Lesser Known Waterfalls - II

Day 2:
Visit to Mallalli falls, Abbimatta Falls and Shivanasamudra:

We got up early morning and decided to trek to Mallali Falls. One of the main reasons to stay at this home stay was its nearness to the falls. The falls is located at a distance of 5km from our home stay. Even though there is a motorable road to the very end we decided to trek to the falls, as it has been a long time since we had done a trek.
There is also an alternate shorter path to the falls from the estate that we had put up but decided to take on the longer one as we didn’t have much activities planned for the day. The first two kilometers of the trek was a tar road after which one needs to take a deviation for the falls. This marks the beginning of the jeep tracks to the falls.
Finally we reached the falls after one hour of walk through the jeep tracks. The path leading to the falls is mainly downhill. There are boards all along the way indicating the ferocity of the falls and the presence of crocodiles in streams.

The falls is situated in a valley covered by dense vegetation on all sides. Of all the falls that I have visited in Karnataka it is one of the most beautiful falls that I have come across given its secluded location and the style of fall. The falls unveils itself in parts as one gets down to the valley. There are concrete steps till half way built by the tourism department to reach the bottom of the valley. The step sizes are quite big creating uneasiness rather than helping out to reach the bottom of the valley.

As we reached the bottom of the falls, we could feel the presence of water in the air making the breeze cooler. As we reached even closer we got drenched completely by the water droplets carried by breeze. It was like a fine spray of water sprayed from a hose. It was an amazing experience of being close to the falls and getting drenched. Due to the slippery rocks it is difficult to get close to the falls and not advisable to get into the water owing to the amount of water present in falls.
We were completely mesmerized by the experience. These are the moments that you enjoy from the journey and make you realize the beauty and treasures of Mother Nature. We then started our journey back from here after spending close to one hour at the falls.
There is a toll gate for the falls where one needs to pay Rs 5 per person as entrance fee. The guy at the toll gate was surprised to see us heading back from the falls. He enquired whether we had stayed back the previous night at the falls. It was strange for him to see people visiting this place so early in the morning. He distributed chocolates and make us realize that it was our Independence Day. We also bought some fruit juices from him. It was fruit juice with a mix of spices which I had never tasted before and was quite good. This also quenched our thirst for the remaining part of our walk.
It took us close to 3 hours for covering the falls. We got freshened up, had a heavy breakfast rather say it a brunch.
As per the initial plan we would be visiting another falls called Abbimatta falls which falls on the way to Somwarpet. After talking with the driver we decided to go ahead and visit the falls even though we were short of fuel in vehicle. Since it was going to be a downhill journey the fuel consumption would be less and hence we were able to cover this falls as well.

Abbimatta falls:

Abbimatta falls is located at a distance of 5-6km from Somwarpet on Pushpagiri road. It is situated close to the fields and owing to monsoon stream flowing right in front of it we were not able to get a closer look of it and also its been partially hidden behind the trees. A talk with the workers in the field suggested that there was no bridge across the stream to reach the falls but one can reach the top of the falls from a temple situated on the other side of the falls.
We usually carry a Tripod to such places for telephoto shots. Looking at these equipments the people working in the fields stopped their work, thinking we might be from press. Such situations have happened many times in our previous trips and now we are used to it.
This was the last activity planned for the day in Coorg. Since we had covered the places quite early we had the option of covering Shivanasamudra also but were not sure if we could reach there on time. We decided to take a call once we were close to Mysore.

The Driver was confident of making it to Shivanasamudra at 4:30 pm which I think was quite a nice time to reach. Things didn’t work out well as planned as we lost our way. The roads were asphalted, and this actually confused the driver who took a wrong diversion. Gautam has a GPS enabled phone, from which we realized we were heading in the wrong direction and also the driver seemed to have realised his mistake. We had lost our precious time and we were in a dilemma weather to head back to Bangalore or make an attempt to reach the falls before dusk.
We decided to head for Shivanasamudra. The roads leading to it were in god condition and finally we were able to reach the place at 5:30 pm.
Shivanasamudra is considered one among the biggest segmented waterfalls. It splits into two on its way resulting in two different waterfalls Gaganachukki and Bharachukki. Since it is a monsoon season we had expected lots of water in the falls but we were disappointed by the view. It was nothing like what I had seen from some of photographs recently posted on it.

We decided to visit Bharachukki as well which is situated at a distance of 13km from Gaganachukki.

The trip ended on a quiet note. We had our dinner at Malavalli and then headed back to Bangalore via Kanakapura road.
It was indeed a good trip given the amount of falls we had covered in two days.