Kokkrebelur trip

Srikant called me at 9.30 pm on saturday.. He had a nice offer.. He asked me whether I want to join him and Manas for a trip to Kokkrebellur to shoot some birds (well with cameras not with a gun).. I was interested and I said yes without giving it a second thought .. Adam also confirmed that he'll be coming also.. I tried to call JK also but he had changed his mobile number and I was not able to reach him .. Anyway, it was Srikant,Manas ,Adam and Me were the travellers to go for this trip .. We fixed a Cab as none of us knew the place..
We started off lil bit late then planned due to some unavoidable cirumstances.. We decided to take the Mysore road as the Map indicated that u have to take a right turn just before Maddur.. The road was in a horrible condition with only half of the road is in drivable condition as the 4 laning of the highway is going on .. We had some close saves on the road and was shaken to the bone once.. What happened is that we've decided to have our lunch at Kamat's Lokaruchi which is on the right side of
the road and as we were trying to to cross the road(our driver was guilty of not looking into the other side traffic) one Maruti 800 almost had hit us .. We survived an mishap by an inch ..Anyway,at Kamath's we had nice and filling south Indian lunch and we told the driver to be more careful next time ..There we thought of asking for the directions to Kokkrebellur and to our shock and disbelief we found that the map given in Outlook Traveller was wrong and we have to take a left not right turn after 10 km or so from Kamath's..
Anyway, we started again and after 10km or so we decided to ask someone on the road for the diversion .. Voila.. to our delightful we found that the diversion is
on exactly same place where we decided to stop for directions ..After that diversion road become small and we could see lots of green paddy fields and nice vistas... It was around around 11 km from the main road to Kokkrebellur .. We reached the spot after a bit of searching.. I was expecting some lake or some water bodies where we can find the birds .. But upon reaching the place we all were to be surprized .. there were birds all over the place, on every tree of every house .. There were literally more birds then the tree leaves in a tree .. I may be exagerating but we were awed to see so many birds in a small village .. but as ill-luck would have it the light was very bad that day .. full of clouds and could not see a bit of sun rays .. Still we thought of carry on the shoot..
After around 2 hours of running ,walking and ofcourse shooting we were tired and also the light was falling off very quickly .. So we decided to pack up and start for Bangalore at around 6.15pm .. This time we thought of taking the Kanakapura road instead of the Mysore road .. So we have taken the other turn and asked some people about the directions..They told us that we need to go to Halagur where we can find the main road and that will take us to Bangalore .. So after around 13-15 kms we could see the main road and relieved to see our way back to Bangalore .. We stopped at Kanakapura for snacks and then reached Bangalore by 9.30/10 pm ..
Though the light was not on our side I still enjoyed the trip and it's a pleasure to see all those birds flying freely in the nature ..