Three friends on a day trip: Nallamala Forest in the Mahindra TUV300

Being in the presence of a temple so deep into a forest beside a waterfall must be the most zen thing I've done in all of 2024.

BHPian Rtn777 recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

Hello forum lurkers, Im Yathin and this is my First time posting a travelogue in TeamBHP!(mods feel free to move the thread to an appropriate forum if needed)
Hope you guys enjoy reading this because the trips has many ups and down.

Planning:

So I was in Nalgonda,Telangana for the weekend to meet my friends and we wanted to go on a drive on Sunday morning, except we did not know where to. and so we did exactly what any trio would do, we grabbed some hot mirchi bajjis and started discussing about what the venue would be, sometime later my friend said he once went to a temple which is on top of a hill a year ago with his family and it was very scenic and fun, we checked the location on map and it was around 60kms from Nalgonda and so we went by his word and finalised the location. We chose our friend's TUV300 as our choice of weapon for the trip.

Execution:

On the previous night we checked all tyres and made sure the spare tyre was in good condition in the case where something goes flat and stocked all the necessary tools. and we kept all the car's legal documentation ready in case of a police interaction, and checked for pending challans(remember this!!). We called it a day at 10pm and we decided we will start our trip at 7am the next day.

Doomsday:

The day has come for when we had to start the trio's first ever day trip! and well....none of us woke up at time

And because it was a Sunday, the trip got more and more delayed but we finally started our road trip at 12pm with good vibes.

Mini heart attack 1:

60 kms since inception we halt near a town called Devarakonda to grab something to eat because we three didn't eat any lunch and so we go to a bakery and grab freshly made onion samosas and aloo samosas and some softdrinks, only to see what we thought was a flat tyre! We decided to halt near an isolated area and change the tyre ourselves even tho we had puncture shop in town just for the heck of it. We stopped at a bunk and checked the tyres again but alas, what we thought was a puncture was a mere illusion caused by the tyre resting on the roadside curb

Mini heart attack 2:

We fueled up, laughed the incident off and head towards our destination which according to google maps was just 15 kilometers from where we were. We go to the location and find ourselves in the middle of a village with no temple or hill in sight! awestruck by the situation we find ourselves in, we approach the locals to ask for directions and they had no clue what we were asking about, thankfully there was no language barrier between them and us, it was only after we asked 4 different people that we got to know that we came in the right direction and our location was 25 more kilometers away from there! and what we thought was a 60km trip turned out to be a 100 km one. Apparently someone did a half-arsed job with setting up the location of the temple.

Rest of the Journey:

After finding the correct address of our destination with the help of the locals we proceed to our destination and man was it a roller coaster! Any car which has less ground clearance would've struggled a lot in this path.

Although the road was bumpy the view which came along with it was worth the hassle. It started drizzing at the right time and the view was so so serene.

The TUV poses with the Krishna River which is flowing between Nallamala hills.

The Final Destination:

We reach the hill we intended to reach and had to parked the car aside to take a small trek towards our final destination.

After leaving the car there, a 5 min trek led us to what was a beautiful Shiva temple which was right beside a waterfall, completely isolated from everyone.

Being in the presence of a temple so deep into a forest beside a waterfall must be the most zen thing I've done in all of 2024.

Vertical photo of the waterfall depicting its height, good flow considering its off season currently. I drank water straight from the water stream and it tasted like packaged bottle water! With natural minerals and all.

I spotted this big tree in the forest and wondered how old it must be. Tree enthusiasts with facts are welcome!

Panaromic view of the surroundings from uptop the hill. If you glance at the bottom right you'd see the route which we took to drive up the hill. Most of the plantation which can be seen in the fields below is peanut plantation. Gym freaks would love this one!

Way back home:

After spending some quality time there and taking some photos we started on our way back home and took the lovely road once again.

The Sun gods decide to and bid us farewell by revealing themselves from behind the clouds! This was the first time we saw sun that day for what otherwise was a dusky and monochrome day.

The TUV 300 posing with the sunset.

Mini heart attack 3:

Shortly after taking the sunset picture on our way back, we see police checking going on and didn't think much of it since we all had our licenses and documents. We stop and roll down the windows and a cop asks for the documents which we show, all good and fine, but we almost died when one of the co-cop shouts "this car has 9 challans accounting to a total of Rs. 3850" We three are left in shock especially when we checked for pending challans just the previous night!!! How could we have possibly managed to get 9 challans in a single day! We get down the car to check the challans (Since we were just college students I even got ready with my dailer to call one of my acquaintance to arrange some emergency moneyTwT) and funnily enough the cop with the iPad entered the wrong registration and when he re-entered our car details it showed a clean record with no pending challans. We took a big sigh of relief and continued the trip back home.

Aftermath of the car after the trip which had significant off-roading!

Endgame:

We finally reached home and thanked ourselves for not ruling the day out considering everyone was in a time pinch that day.

Thanks!

If you have read the complete thread till here, thanks a lot. I am also glad to be a part of Team BHP to be able to share my wonderful experience. Cheers to many more experiences such as this! I'll leave this here.

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