Kinaara

Celebrating New Year evening in beautiful coastal part of India especially Goa is a silent wish of every young person, at least nowadays! We (me and Anuj) couldn’t celebrate it there, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t celebrate it. ;)

Being part of a bird watching group ‘Warblers and Waders’, we visited many places in and around Trivandrum along with professionals. When we joined at Hassan, we were desperately in search of a similar kind of group to roam around and spend weekends in a better way. A few weeks later, we came to know about the trekking group in our own workplace. Fortunately they were planning a beach trek from Gokarna to Kumta in the first week of January. And we decided to join them within no time, as they said, this was going to be the last trek of this season! We were quite excited about this trek after reading a lot on the internet about it. No doubt, it was better than any other commonly fantasized New Year celebration!

As it was the first trek with colleagues, and we were the only two non-kannada members, the journey to Gokarna was a bit boring. We left Hassan at around 10:30pm and reached Gokarna by 6 O’clock. Bun-tea at 3 near Jog Falls followed by the 60km ghaat section was the only exciting part of the journey. And yeah, we came to know about the Explore-India expedition by our trek-organizer. He has travelled to many states in his own car! #Respect

 Gokarna is a small but famous place, crowded with many foreigners and Indian devotees. I couldn’t resist myself having a photo-walk there. We were pretty surprised to see so many hotels and restaurants there. We saw a man playing the long Australian Pipe like instrument. We had a peaceful darshan of lord Mahabaleshwar followed by a breakfast in ‘Pai Restaurant’. On the way to beach, we collected some cow dung cakes for the bonfire in the night. 

We reached our starting point ‘Gokarna beach’ and started the trek at around 11 am heading south of the beach. We were looking like a Lagaan team as few of us were carrying towels on the back. Anuj’s binoc was complimentary to my camera; people wondered how old it was! We climbed the first hill, which was quite easy. Once on the top of the hill, a wonderful landscape was seen. Beach at the back, grasslands in the front and deep sea on the right! Foot-trails were always found throughout the trek. We got view of the beautiful Kudale Beach in a few minutes. We climbed down the hill to enter a village just before the beach which was inhabited by foreigners mostly. We entered a restaurant from the back side and scared a few foreigners by our backdoor entry. “Where did they come from? Did they come from the sky?”, asked one of the bewildered foreigner. Kudle beach hardly had any Indian. 

Hill climb#2 was less easy, and it again gave a feel of Lord of The Rings. We entered a park which descended onto the Om Beach. Ultimate View! Next was the Half Moon Beach. Undoubtedly awesome! We moved on. A snake fell in front of Anuj from the tree and slithered away into the shrubs. To reach the next i.e. Paradise beach, we had to negotiate both the hill and the sea rocks. We had lunch on one of the sea rocks. Paradise beach was also small, but every beach in the trek was unique! Hill climb#4 looked a little tough, which it was. The plan was to reach the harbor, get ferry to cross the river and reach the Nirvana Beach (long beach). It was visible from far but reaching there was a bit difficult. We had a Swades style ferry to cross the river. We reached the Nirvana beach around 5:30 pm. It was ultra-awesome long beach with no tourists at all. It was almost sunset time. We gathered some firewood for the campfire. Anuj says, I was following like Gollum. But I got some catchy snaps on the way. We saw a beautiful sunset. I went for a dip in sea after the sunset.

When it was dark, we all sat down and were discussing about the past treks and trips. The air was still windy and it was getting darker. The camp fire was lit. We opened our dinner packets, and enjoyed it. The stars were now visible and there were literally countless of them! ‘I havn’t seen so many stars inside the Orion’, Anuj says. He saw a couple of meteors too. We all arranged bedding on the beach and tried to sleep. Wind almost stopped and there was only sound of waves (Kalloli, in Assamese <3). I was asleep around 9 in my sleeping bag. Anuj had a little problem sleeping, as there was no wind. The moon rise was at 2.

           We got up at 5am and started walking in moon-light. Amazing feeling! We also saw the boats of fishermen going into the open sea one after another. Two coastguards enquired about the purpose of our visit and warned about the sea. The light from the east was increasing and at around 6:30 am, the sun rose. We covered major stretch of our trek till 8am (around 6km). We had breakfast on the southern end of Nirvana beach and headed towards Kumta which was beyond 3 more hills. After crossing the first hill, came an unknown beach. No tourists at all! Totally unexplored! The next hill was the toughest to cross. We had to go over the sea rocks. Huge sea rocks! A few of them were dangerously slippery. After the second hill came another big beach. It was peaceful except 2-3 fishermen handling their boats. We crossed the next hill, and reached our desired destination Kumta, where our Tavera was waiting for us. The return journey also included a bath at a small waterfall at ‘Apsaraconda’ and visits to Murudeshwar Temple and Shringeri Math. We finally reached Hassan at around midnight driving through dense fog in the Ghats on the way.

~ Shakun and Anuj