Tejas

We started from Bangalore on the 6th May around 12:30 in the noon to Mysore. It was a bright and sunny day. We met our team mates (team downs) in Mysore and started towards Bandipur. The plan was to go to N.Begur and meet the range officer and collect the route map and go to Bandipur. The forest range officer Basavaraj was very good in explaining the route and provided with the team of two guards.
Our motto was to count the number of elephants available in our range. We were put up in DODDA HALLA the center range in Gundre Forest zone. Our team consists of 6 members Praveen, Nagaraj, Kiran, Sunil, Santosh and me (Girish).
We started from N.Begur towards Dodda Halla antipoaching camp around 11:30pm and reached Dodda Halla around 1:30 in the morning. We introduced ourselves to the guard (Gopalgowda). We slept and got up at 06:00 in the morning. It was a wonderful experience listening to birds early in the morning. The main course was yet to come the much awaited jungle trekking. The entire team was very excited.
We had the morning tea (kattan chai) and upma as our breakfast. We started the jungle trek at 07:30am and we entered the forest looking for elephants. These tracks are special tracks and normal Jungle Safari is not allowed in these routes. We searched the entire Dodda Halla range. We sighted 8 elephants on day 1. We got a bunch of 6 elephants near Dodda Halla Lake and those elephants were very aggressive. Apart from elephants we got to see a lot of deer’s, bison’s, sambar’s, languor’s and the most important the PUG MARK. It was so interesting we skipped our lunch and we reached camp at 06:30 in the evening. We had nice ragi balls and dal for dinner.
We started another day with Upma. We completed our breakfast and started the trek at 10:00am towards Dondi Kere. We were divided in pairs and each pair was provided with a watcher. The watcher was carrying a pistol with two cartridges. I saw an elephant with her small baby near the lake. I was waiting to watch a few more elephants and was able to sight a group of 10 elephants. That was the end of day two.
On day three we went on a track where elephants go. We got to see a lot of elephant marks and also we sighted a couple of elephants on that day. We came back to N.Begur at 02:30pm and started back to Bangalore.