One of the memorable, adventurous and most dangerous trip in our entire lifetime was our trip to Agumbe, a destination that’s famously known as “Cherrapunji of the south”.
In Agumbe, it rains throughout the year. This place is most of the times referred to as “agumbe rainforest”. At a distance of 350+ km from Bangalore, Agumbe is a must visit place (we repeat, its a must visit, if you have high adrenalin rush) in Shimoga district.
Agumbe is also famous for one more thing – King Cobra!
Our sole reason for the trip to Agumbe was to learn about King Cobras and see them live (rather than seeing them in a zoo) in action.
We went along with two professionals to Agumbe —
- Amoghavarsha, a renowned photographer, wildlife filmaker and nature enthusiast
- Gowri Shankar, a wildlife biologist who is studying about King Cobras for more than two decades, he is famously known as “the king cobra man”
We took a KSRTC bus from Bangalore and reached Agumbe by 6 am. Our first impression of Agumbe was – green, green and green everywhere. Almost all houses were covered with moss, and there were dense green trees on both sides of the road. We hardly noticed anyone in Agumbe.
From Agumbe bus station, we hopped on to a private jeep and started our journey into the forest to reach ARRS – Agumbe Rainforest Research Station.
We stopped our jeep in this place to take photos. There were no one except us.
Amogh and Gowri took us to a place that had lot of frogs. Nothing special in seeing a frog, right? See picture below to see the size of the frog we spotted. I’ve never seen a frog smaller than this. We took a frog, kept it on our thumb nail to see it close. The frog occupies only 50% of the thumb’s nail, imagine its tiny size.
We continued our journey towards ARRS.
Fog all over the place.
After a 20 minute drive, we reached ARRS.
ARRS is a research organisation started by famous herpetologist Rom Whitaker in 2005.
ARRS is where we stayed during our trip. The place has bunker beds, very simple bathrooms, and a tent under which food will be served. Though the facilities are extremely basic, getting all these basic facilities inside Agumbe forest is a luxury. Its better to experience it to truly understand the feeling of living a local Agumbe life.
Amoghavarsha and Gowri Shankar alerted us before the trip itself that Agumbe has plenty of leeches. But, we under estimated their warning. There were leeches in bathrooms too. We experienced living with leeches for the first time.
For people who haven’t experienced leeches — Leeches climb your legs and you wouldn’t even feel it most of the times. Leeches bite and suck your blood. When you accidentally look down at your leg, chances are high that there will be 10+ leeches on your legs and you are bleeding already.
When I looked at my leg, I was bleeding from three places. See picture below.
We were given leech protective gumboots that cover your leg from knee to foot, its THAT big. Irrespective of the huge shoe size, time and again leeches proved us wrong. They climbed much above our knees towards the upper portion of the body.
Without any exaggeration, at a given point of time, there were at least 50+ leeches on my body (irrespective of the leech protective shoe).
In front of ARRS was a tent in which breakfast was served. Since ARRS is completely surrounded with thick trees on all sides, there were many varieties of reptiles.
Guess what we saw right outside our breakfast tent? A green pit viper snake!
The snake was perfectly camouflaged.
Unlike a forest jeep safari trip in Bandipur or Kabini, this trip inside Agumbe rainforest was by walk. Imagine the scene — you casually take a walk and there is a snake at your chest level and within five feet from you.
Our journey into the forest started by 10 am. In part two of this article, we discuss about our most thrilling forest experience ever, and all interesting reptiles we spotted are also showcased — Part 2 Here.
