Welcome everyone to a new series #EdenAtlas with Wilderhood:Recitals, an attempt to share my experiences from the wonderful places I visited during my voyage with Nature, Wildlife travel, and Photography.
(Disclaimer: I am planning to share a post every week and share my experiences and clicks from those places and strictly they are not any ranking or chronological order!)
Ever since shutter bug bit me, I started visiting places and these are *THE* places in my opinion and for the same reason I keep visiting these places again and again to get more from the place. As a result I had wonderful opportunity to explore these places and opportunity to photograph. As India is rich interms of lots of bio-diversity hotspots, every place will offer something new and traveling to these places during different seasons would reveal whole lots of new experience about these places and great opportunity to photograph the same!
The important thing as Nature Enthusiast and a owner of the company, Wilderhood.com, which is an experience travel portal, I would like to share you that as beautiful as this nature is and in India, we been blessed with lots of bio-diversity, every place offers something new which is true *but the most ignored fact* is, every place has something different to offer during different seasons throughout the year!
With the first edition of #EdenAtlas, I would like to introduce the beautiful place on the earth, in my opinion, and very close to my heart, Kuveshi, a village near castlerock located around 12kms from Castlerock and 64 kms from Dudhsagar waterfalls, infact the place known to be the feed for DudhSagar Waterfalls and is surrounded by Dandeli-Anshi Tiger reserve, now known as Kali Tiger Reserve.
Kuveshi, one of the beautiful places I have visited in my voyages to the Nature in the past 5 years and had an opportunity travel 2 times in last 2 years without a miss during every monsoon!
Some interesting facts about Kuveshi:
- For wildlife, Kuveshi has been declared as type-class location for hypnale hypnale i.e. Hump-nosed pit viper,
- The village comes in the core area of Tiger reserve near Castlerock and Dandeli,
- Highly restricted area and one should take permits from the forest department to visit and only permitted vehicles are allowed inside,
- Here is the DudhSagar waterfalls start, I mean Kuveshi is feed for DudhSagar waterfalls, very famous from Karnataka and Goa border
My learnings from my last two year visits
- From Castlerock railway cross, need to enter the forest core area in the permitted vehicles and reach 12 kms inside the jungle and pass the stream to walk about 3-4 kms to reach the village and our base camp Hypnale research centre,
- Upon reaching the research station, we been warned *NOT* to turn off the leaking water taps as water is coming due to gravitational force and once tried stopping bursted the entire pipeline in the village
- Village is about 30 kitchens and no electricity and no mobile connectivity yet! Farming is the main activity and you'll a lots of paddy fields around!
- Village has a school and the student count is increased from 8-12 from last year and they've been provided a laptop for education, thanks to conservation efforts. Ahaa..! I got your question..! The teacher who visits them every day from other village gets the laptop charged when required!
An interesting story (but very common for the villagers live there) I heard during my visit,
A domestic dog called 'Tiger', who used to visit us at research station has been picked by Leopard last year and this year when I visited to our surprise been told this guy was back and could see him escaped with only a little scratch on his neck. They call him 'Tiger' for no reason!! :)
Apart from the famous Hump-nosed pit viper, Malabar Pit Viper, Cat Snake, Green Vine Snake and sightings of King Cobra(haven't been lucky yet! :(), we have sighted Mouse deer (very uncommon), Civet cat and Gaurs. Leopards keep visiting the village for preying on the cattle and domestic dogs from the houses.
In the next edition of EdenAtlas, I will introduce you to one more place. Keep Watching this space for more!