Visit to Top Slip, Annamalai Hills

Recently, I visited this place called Top Slip in the Annamalai Hills, Tamil Nadu. My parents had come on some work to Coimbatore so I started from Bangalore to meet up with them. By the way, if you plan to halt at Coimbatore, I recommend the Perur Shiva Temple and the cross-cut road for some shopping. My mom was so excited to find sarees available at half of the price that you usually pay in big cities like Bangalore or Hyderabad.

From Coimbatore, we booked an a/c Indica to go to Top slip via Pollachi. From Coimbatore to Pollachi, the road is straight but from Pollachi its a ghat road; top slip is about 750 m above sea level. Another thing to remember is -avoid going to top slip in the monsoon season.
We started in the morning at around 9.30 and we reached top slip in the afternoon. There we stayed in a forest guest house. The scenery all around was that of green and brown. Infact, I was amazed to see boars and spotted deer roaming in the rolling greens and a chloropsis and lorikeets on a tree just in front of our guest house. I immediately thought to myself that this is going to be another amazing holiday trip !

We finished our lunch, took some rest and after a while just started walking on the path that led us into the forest behind our guest house with a couple of binoculars for some bird watching. Luckily we spotted quite a bit of activity near some trees hardly after walking for 100 m...and I was so thrilled to see a variety of birds. In fact it was the first time a saw such a congregation of different kind of birds at one place. We were later told that it is very unsafe to travel on foot alone as wild elephants roam freely in that region and hence give the hills their name (Aana -elephant, Malai -hills).

In the early evening, we boarded a forest department's bus that took us to the elephant training camp and on the way spotted a barking dear foraging hardly a few metres away from our bus. Again I was very excited to see so many elephants in a natural setting. We were told that the local tribes were well known for their ability to train the elephants and that they made excellent mahouts.

We returned back to the guest house and relaxed for sometime and later headed back into the forest for a night safari. We went in a jeep along with a two man team comprising of the driver and a forest guard, who was equipped with a powerful searchlight. As the driver slowly rode along, the guard would throw the light around to spot any animals. My dad explained to me that they use a clever trick to spot animals easily using this method- As the light is shown, the animal if present in the line of the beam, would turn to see the light. The person sitting behind the search light would then suddenly see a pair of eyes lighted up like radium stickers.

With the help of the search light we were able to spot bisons, sambhars and even a mouse deer, which is extremely difficult to spot. We were hoping to spot a predator but were not that lucky this time. But overall it was an excellent experience, I mean going out into the jungle in the night and getting a chance to observe animals like bisons at such close quarters.

The next morning, we started our journey back to Coimbatore. Again we were greeted by a few birds like a rocket-tailed drongo (that was making some really interesting calls), crow pheasant, some bee catchers and a group of highly endangered lion tailed macaques swinging from one tree onto another.