Skip to main content

The Upper Bhavani

Upper Bhavani
Story

Upper Bhavani in Southwestern Nilgiris is not just a dam and reservoir place to visit and see.  There are quite a few interesting locales in its vicinity to venture out if you are a little bit adventurous - the weir dam, the bison's swamp,  the drinking water pump house - to name a few.

When you are driving from Korakundah, just a km before the Upper Bhavani inspection bungalow, there is a right branch road, which leads to a transformer yard within a few minutes of careful slow driving.  Be prepared to see the remnants and leftovers from some striped cats and their scats. We used to call it the tigers' dining room.

From the transformer yard, in the deep ravine on your right, you can see a dilapidated red-roofed shed on the bank of a beautiful brook and a small check dam. There are steps, in not so good condition, and a misstep will take you down literally in breakneck speed.

The brook is an inlet to the Upper Bhavani reservoir and a perennial source of inflow from the surrounding shola patches. Inside the shed, there still remains the original equipment made in UK.

The water from the check dam is pumped to a storage tank situated atop a hillock, which is located directly opposite to the interpretation centre of Mukurthi National Park.  The storage tank used to feed the water needs of inspection bungalow and the Upper Bhavani TNEB camp and quarters.

When the camp was functioning, a couple of TNEB staff used to come here about three or four times a week to start the pump and fill the tank, takes about half-day work, an interesting little hike for me with anecdotes and adventures from them keeping me hooked.

And in one instance, the pair sent on water pump duty, after some time, came back running hard, breathing heavily, pale faced, rambling incoherently.  It took more than half an hour for them to say clearly that they had interrupted a tiger on a fresh kill!

Kill

Just imagine a tiger with a blood drooling face in close quarters giving a blood curdling growl.  It took more than two days for those poor fellows to regain some sort of normalcy.  And of course, we had to ration the water usage for the next few days, and then a big posse of people making a lot of noise went for the water pump duty.  I prudently remained in the camp.  Thankfully no untoward incident happened.

 

admin