Dayal Karunakaran on Clubhouse

Bio

Writer |'90 EscapeRoad Traveller | FamilyTraveller | Reading | Literature | History | Politics.

EscapeRoad❤ was a mesmerizing and strategic millitary road built by Britishers in 1925 which connected Munnar Top Station to Kodaikkanal with a distance of mere 49 km, through 'Vandarvu Ridge'(8140 ft) the highest motorable path especially south of Himalayas. Since '90 EscapeRoad was closed and thrown to the vault of forgetting by the Kerala- Tamilnadu governments unitedly.

Luckily, in 1990, just after days of the legal closure of EscapeRoad, we seven young friends, all were around the age of twenties, had travelled through this route in a new Ambassador car. Unfortunately just after one or two hairpins of 'Vandararvu Peak' our car had got mechanical error and we were forced to push the 'Amby' till Berjam lake, a terrifying distance of 25 kms. Also it was a twelve hour hectic journey met with tough terrain with boulders, desrepaired ghats, stubborn forest watchers, fiery forest fires, unidentified men whether wood smugglers or miscreants, aggressive night buffalos, leopards, gun points and our journey ended in the wee hours of the night in Kodaikanal with fully exhausted body and mind.

After 25 years, in 2015, I wrote our EscapeRoad experiences in my facebook wall, as the first ever travelogue on EscapeRoad in malayalam language, and other travel groups like 'Sanchari' and later in 'Charithranweshikal', and still the moment it attracts several EscapeRoad lovers. It was also published in Manorama Traveller magazine of February 2017.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=865853540130565&id=100001177814839

https://www.facebook.com/dayalkarun