Dudhsagar Waterfall – Reaching Here is an Adventure – Travel Photography
It is nice to have a feature-rich camera that makes technically superior images. But when there is something interesting unfolding in front of you, even a cell-phone camera can be useful in telling the story. When the visit to Dudhsagar falls turned out to be a small adventure of riding over train tracks (!), treading on bridle paths and crossing streams on two wheels.
I was travelling in Goa last week, hoping to see the monsoons enrich the green landscapes of the region. The intent was to see, observe and relish the earth come alive with the rains. That meant leaving the camera at home and letting bare-eyes do all the capturing. This worked fine for much of the time, but I had an irresistible urge to capture an excellent story that unfolded in front of me, when I visited the well-known Dudhsagar Waterfalls.
The journey to Dudhsagar is very unique and is almost a mini-adventure. On reaching Collem, the roadhead to the waterfall, you need to hire a local vehicle to take you through the last ten kilometers inside Mahaveer Wildlife Sanctuary. For much of the year, this journey is made on 4×4 jeeps on an unmetalled road. But during the monsoons, flooding streams take over the roads and commuting on jeeps is not an option. The local ingenuity now takes over and two wheelers replace the jeeps.
But wouldn’t two-wheelers get affected by inundated roads? Yes, indeed. The solution is to find an alternate route that only two-wheelers can take. This is where the journey becomes an adventure.
The ride begins on a metaled road first. Predictably, it soon becomes a muddy jeep track. I expected this to narrow down a bit and get a little difficult for jeeps to travel, or may be part of the path getting too slushy for four-wheelers. Wrong! Without warning, my pilot (that’s what they call the person who rides the motor-bike for you) suddenly turned off from the road and entered a bridle path! It was a narrow, slippery mud track with thick vegetation on both sides. As if this is not enough surprise, the path quickly nose-dived into a steep incline, which could be tackled only by the deftest riders.
This mud track was just the beginning of my story. The path ended with a dangerously steep descent into a railway line. Naturally, I thought we are going to cross the railway line, and hoped that we have a wider road on the other side. Wrong again! My pilot now made his way along the edge of the track, making a bumpy ride along the ballast just inches away from a fifteen feet drop. Once again, I mistakenly thought that this could be a temporary arrangement lasting a few hundred feet before we hit some good spot. But we must have travelled for more than fifteen minutes on this precarious path before finally hitting the jeep track.
I finally heaved a sigh of relief. The jeep track wasn?t exactly the safest road that you could expect, but it was way better than what I had just gone through. The track was muddy and often slippery, but the pilot was so good (having reached so far without accidents) that I could not be bothered any more. We drove through a thick jungle, often getting into foot-deep streams that flowed gently. Perhaps the streams would pose another challenge that the pilots will have to handle in the peak of rains, but right now they made a safe and enjoyable crossing.
I watched in awe from my pillion seat as the pilot handled the motorbike in a remarkably effortless manner. Along the way, I thought the adventurous journey would make an interesting photo-story. Though I had not carried the camera, my cell-phone camera would perhaps be good enough to capture the adventurous aspects of the journey.
On the way back, I instructed the pilot that I would want to take a few pictures along the way. He was glad to oblige. I made a few images at strategic locations, such as stream-crossing, train-track ride and at the narrow muddy tracks. The story would not have been complete unless I also showcased the destination that warranted this journey. So I made a few images of Dudhsagar Waterfall, keeping people in the frame to show the scale of the fall.
At the end of it, I did not have technically or visually excellent images that would make heads turn, but put together, I had a story that appeared more interesting because of the images.
This story was published in July 2014 issue of Terrascape Magazine, where I write a column on photography.