My cousin Mukund, his friends Puneeth, Vishwas and another guy whose name I forget and I had done the same trail a few years ago. We trekked from Byaalagudi to Jodigere and spend the night at the guest house. However we had been there in September and it had rained heavily. Spotted a couple of elephants in the distance and some bison too during the trek from Byaalagudi to Jodigere.
The next morning we took a trail which involved climbing down a mountain to somewhere near Kollegal. This was a really challenging downhill climb and was very exhilarating. We were accompanied by a forest guide and a couple of the local Soliga boys (a tribe resident in the area) and were having good fun and the great physical effort that we had to put in to climb down the hill was being forgotten.
Before we planned this trip, my cousin had consulted a website (I don't remember which one) on the difficulty level of the trail and had found it to be "difficult". We were thoroughly enjoying ourselves and my cousin even remarked that this was one of the easiest trails he had ever done; and he had done quite a number of trails.
Puneeth was at the head of the group and Mukund was at the tail. Suddenly, we heard my cousin scream in great pain. He had lost his footing in some loose rocks and had had a bad fall. His arm had been caught in a crevice between the rocks and he was having great difficulty dislodging it. We finally got his hand free and when we checked, we could make out that his left hand had been broken.
What were we to do? We were in the middle of the jungle, halfway down the hill with a long distance to reach the base camp. None of us had any idea of what the first aid procedure was for a fracture. We contemplated sending the gaurd or the guides back for help but were told that it was dangerous for us to stop moving since we were bang in the middle of elephant country.
. We decided (actually we had no other option), to continue down the hill with each person taking turns to support Mukund and help him down the hill. Now this was easier said than done since
1. Puneeth and I (apart from Mukund) were the only ones who were at any levels of fitness
2. The guides were only young boys and they could definitely not support my cousin who is a big man
3. We could not rely on the guard since we needed him to man the rifle he was carrying if we were accosted by any wildlife
The next few hours were characterized by a slow and painful descent down the hill. At many places, there was just a tree trunk bridging abysses that were pretty deep (at the time they looked like plunging all the way to paataala loka). Puneeth and I had to be extremely careful to make sure that we did not fall to our collective deaths along with Mukund and this took a lot of doing.
When we finally got to the bottom of the hill, we found that we were still in the middle of a thick jungle. We walked for a few kilometers (along the way spotting an elephant calf's carcass and tiger tracks, which spurred us to walk as fast as we could). We reached the nearest village, where we flagged down a tractor (not a great mode of transport for someone with broken bones) which took us to Kollegal, the nearest town in Chamarajanagar district.
In Kollegal, at a hospital, we learnt that Mukund's hand was broken in a couple of places and it would need surgery that could be performed either in Bangalore or Mysore.
From thereon, we hired an Amby back to Bangalore and reached there in the middle of the night. We took Mukund directly to MSR Hospital where he was operated upon the next day. He currently sports a rod in his hand with a couple of metal plates where the bone was fractured. He has a really gnarly looking scar to show for it. Sadly, this was the last time my sis-in-law let him go on any kind of adventure (this was the second time that he got into trouble on an outing - the first time around, he had almost been swept away in the current at Mekedaatu in front of her eyes, barely a few months after their wedding)
To his credit, Mukund did not even show that he was in pain, (apart from the first couple of hours and some instances of really bad bumps during the tractor ride) even when he was asleep (people generally moan in their sleep if they are in pain). At the end of it all, we were thankful to God for getting him back home without any further danger.