Manjalar dam to Thalaiyar Falls Trek

'Rs. 47', says the hotel owner.

'Per person?', we ask. 

'No. For all four of you', he says.

We pay the breakfast and walk out with shocked faces. We had just eaten like giants and couldn't believe that the bill was this low.  We them proceeded to the Manjalar dam that was surrounded by mountains with clouds just hovering over them. The place looked magical. We initially walked along the path of wild animals and we could make out bison and boar pug marks. We crossed the Manjalar river twice before we finally hit the main stream. 

We used an iron chain that had been installed by the locals to cross the river and after this, it was more of hopping on the boulders of river Manjalar. It proved to be an extremely wrong time to trek as the stream was still gushing with water. It would have been easier had we attempted it after the winter  had got over. The boulders were huge, all more than 7 feet and we had a real tough time climbing and proceeding upstream to reach the base of the falls. 

This jolly walk along the stream soon changed into a tough boulder hopping trek.

After an hour or so, we were pretty close to the falls but the water current became too heavy to even attempt going further upstream. At one point, I was slightly taken aback when the river surface that we were walking on seemed to have a huge pit in it. I called Rohith, a 6 feet tall guy in my team to check the depth of the stream at the point just ahead of me. After a few seconds of putting his leg in, he just looked at me and gave a blank stare. It was now sure. We would be plain idiots to proceed further upstream. I immediately instructed the guys to get out of the water and we tried walking along the river bed for some time. This too proved difficult as the bushes were too overgrown beyond a certain point. We decided to come back to this place after a few months and were calling off the trek. However, we wanted to take a photograph of the Thalayar falls from where we were, so we climbed the mountain face to our left. Since the bushes were too overgrown, we climbed on a massive landslide that had occured earlier. 

During the return trek, Sidharth, one of my team mates told me that he had injured his leg while trekking on the huge boulders and that he would be going back to Chennai that night instead of coming with us for the next two days' trek. It was sad but there weren't much options left. We enjoyed in the stream near a village temple inside the jungle and then reached Theni bus stop where we bid adieu to Sid and proceeded to Bodi to stay overnight before we set out on the next day's trek.