Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I extracted GPS tracks and projected them on a map.

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Kishore’s friends were doing the Sakleshpur-Yedakumeri-Subramanya railway trek. Having long wanted to do it too, I tagged along. There were 34 people in the group (of them 15 girls) so we pretty much had the bus to ourselves. We started at Donigal, a few kilometres from Sakleshpur, where the road conveniently passes within a couple hundred metres of the tracks.



This section of track has been abandoned for several years, apparently for conversion from metre to broad gauge. It is now a popular trekking route with both bus drivers and railway workers accustomed to the sight of backpack wielding youth.

The bus dropped us off at 5 AM. We spent an hour or so under the nearest street lamp, distributing rented sleeping mats and food packets. Someone had mistaken the trek for a picnic and gone shopping for flavoured milk in glass bottles, potato chips and other salted (thirst inducing) snacks, entire cartons of apple and orange juice, loaves of bread, with butter, and other such items that were low on energy while high on packaging weight. We got rid of most of them before boarding the bus; the rest we had to carry.

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