Trip to Narsapur Forest

I had been there long time ago...in the 1990s, It was with a bunch of friends from Hyderabad University that I had been to Narsapur Reserve Forest. A small undulated forest complete with small hillocks and thick tree cover.The best part is it is within 50-60 km of Hyderabad city.

That trek was an eventful one, we had traveled in a red colored APSRTC bus ...These usually ply to small towns and villages from the city. Having got off the bus, we hit a trek path inside the jungle, then we had got lost before a goat herd bailed us out.. Eventually we found civilisation and also a commute back to the city !

Ever since I came back to Hyderabad, the desire has always been there to explore the forest again. I needed a group. my wife was more than keen enough add to that a group of trekkies at the office and my work team (whom I literaly had to con into coming) and we were ready to go !!

I googled for Narsapur Forest. Very little information could be found on the place on the web. As such Eco tourism is quite scarce in Andhra Pradesh .Still I found a few snippets here and there, my other great source of information was google earth and wikipedia. In wiki someone has clearly marked the forest and you can view satelite images of the forest from way above.

all in all i could summarise that the altitude is 1700-2000 feet. there are some hillocks and lakes inside the forest. it is definitely several square kilometres in area, my guess would be around 25 sq km. All sounded very exciting.

We started on a late saturday morning, group coordination and traffic meant we were very late so a long hike was ruled out. After you cross the jeedimetla industrial area and keep driving for about 40-50 km from the city basically, The forest just springs upon you like a surprise. suddenly the landscape changes into thick trees and wooded landscape on bothsides of the road.

We stopped and aksed a small tea shop owner just before the forest starts on whether the forest could be trekked through. Surprisingly he did not mock at us. he said you could go inside - nothing about naxal hideouts either ! then one of my friends asked him whether they were any animals inside - negative , dont expect to see animals !

There were monkeys - lots of them , and seemed quite naughty. The snacks we were carrying were firmly tucked inside backpacks so no worries. We headed in a North Easternly direction - the compass aiding our direction. The forest was quite thick and soon lots of small thorns were adorned on everyone's jeans and trousers. There are some open spaces and shady spots too inside making it a beautiful hideout place.




You could see several stream paths which had now dried out. This being december, it had not rained in quite some time. But i think it would be a great place to trek in the monsoon times. After treking through for 3 kms or so we decided to turn back and trek . There was a huge hill that me and some others wanted to trek but the majority of us were mostly office couch potatoes with not too much physical activity and doing further hiking would have seriously compromised lunch , so we had to turn back. I reserved the hill hike for my monsoon trek, also made a note to discover the lake in the middle of the jungle during that time !

There are plenty of beautiful birds to spot. We spotted some parakeets . Also we were lucky to spot a mongoose which shied away as soon as it saw us.

We had a tough time getting back to the road , even with the help of the compass - which turned out to be a great boon. Without the compass we would have ended up going in circles forever. By the time all of us got back to the road and our parked cars, we had all earned our lunch at the Dhaba on the way back to the city !