Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 12, 2018

Adventures eating a sauce made from the the worlds Hottest Pepper

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 1:30 PM

Regular readers of the blog and folks who know me well know that I love spicy food and am always on the lookout for new spicy sauces/pickles to try. When I visited Bhutan a few years ago I picked up a bag of the spiciest chilly available there to be made into a pickle and I have done the same for all places I visit. Mom made a pickle from Bhoot Jolokia (the spiciest chilly in the world till a few years ago) for me and that is my favorite pickle ever.

Recently Vinit went to the US and got a Hot Sauce made from Carolina Reaper (current record holder for spiciest chilly in the world) for dad and I stole borrowed some of it for my use here in Bangalore. I knew the sauce was spicy but didn’t quite realize how spicy it was till I tried it over the weekend. I was having boiled eggs and they tasted a bit bland so I thought I would use my new sauce to spice things up. I added one drop on each half of the two eggs I had and took ate the whole egg one shot. By the time I finished one egg I had tears coming out my eyes and had to run to eat some butter, cheese and water to take away the heat as my mouth was on fire. After multiple slices of cheese, butter and bread I was ready to face the eggs again and though I did manage to finish the remaining egg I realized that even one drop of the sauce was too much for me.

I am thankful that I decided to play it safe and didn’t slather the egg with the sauce like I usually tend to do, else I could have ended up in the hospital like this poor chap who ate a whole Carolina Reaper for a shot at a record in the Guinness book of World Records. He started with the regular burning sensation and graduated to thunderclap headaches. When the docs did a scan of his brain they found that his arteries had become constricted due to the high levels of capsaicin. To be fair the docs think that this is not a normal reaction and that he must have heightened sensitivity to capsaicin. But still…

Interestingly there is a new contender for the throne of the Spiciest Chilly in the world called Dragonรขโ‚ฌโ„ขs Breath which is 1.5 times spicier than even the Carolina Reaper. Which makes me want to try it out even more. I wonder if I can get some of it shipped to India. ๐Ÿ™‚

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

April 7, 2018

Went trekking to Pyramid Hills, Shivanasamudra

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 10:36 PM

This last weekend I went for my first trek of 2018 to Pyramid Hills which is situated in the Kolegal village near Shivanasamudra. The Trek was organized by Plan the Unplanned and was my first experience with the group.

The trek started at 10:30am from Bangalore instead of Friday nights like most of the Treks I have been to in the past which was a bit surprising. Since there were 7 of us friends going for it together and the pickup point was walking distance from my place we decided to have everyone over to my place for breakfast at 9am so that we start the trip on a full stomach. Everyone made to my place on time (yeah I was surprised too…) and we had a filling breakfast of Apple Pie, Eggs, Mattar Paneer and bread before boarding the bus and started the journey into the unknown (or rather to Sivansamudra).

Interestingly this group was a lot less diverse than some of the other Treks I have been to… in the sense that most of us were in the software industry and the average age was in the mid to late 20’s. (If you exclude me and Jani). Usually the groups are a lot more diverse but that could be because our group accounted for 7 out of the 14 people. That being said it was a fun trip which I enjoyed quite a bit and I made some new friends ๐Ÿ™‚

Since a lot of us already knew each other, I was expecting the introductions to be a bit boring and repetitive. However I am happy to say that was not the case. The group leaders (Tarun and Aditi) asked us to act out our names or the name of our parent (if we had already introduced ourselves) using dumb charades. It was hilarious to watch folks trying to act out their names and it served as a good ice breaker for the team. The intro followed by an actual game of dumb charades helping us pass the time during the 4 hour drive to reach the base camp. We reached the camp just in time for Lunch and Ratna, the owner of Calver camps had lunch ready for us under an open air setup. As all of us were quite hungry at this time we attacked the food and finished in record time. On a side note, the food on this trip was among the best I have had on treks, usually it is just lemon rice and some snacks but this time it was really good and filling.


The Open Air Dinning hall and welcome area (PC: Durga)

Post lunch we rested for a little while to allow everyone to recover from the post lunch coma and then started on the first trek of the trip. Jani immediately inaugurated the trek by walking into thorny bushes and getting scratched all over. The first part of the trek was through fields that had recently been plowed but there was a clear path through so it was easy walking. The second part of the trek involved some steep climbing, with parts of it at almost 60 degrees. It was steep enough that none of us had breath to sing like we normally do during the walk. Most of us took it easy except for JD who had a bet with Ratna to reach the top within 23 mins. To all our surprise he actually made it to the top in 23 minutes flat to win the bet. The rest of us took quite a lot longer with frequent breaks but were there in time to watch the sunset.


Group Pic a the beginning of the Trek


The Trail to the top of Pyramid Hill (This is how steep it was) [PC: Tarun]


Taking a breather on the way [PC: Tarun]


We Made it! Group Pic at the top of Pyramid Hill [PC: Ayush]

After reaching the top we all relaxed on the rocks for a while, took a whole lot of pics before starting back down. Personally I felt that coming down was easier but not everyone agreed with me as the way down was slippery. At least this time we didn’t have folks having a contest about who would fall most often while coming down. ๐Ÿ™‚ By the time we reached the bottom it was dark and we really didn’t have an idea of which way the campsite was supposed to be. So we followed the dog who had accompanied us for the climb, and it took us through a roundabout way but we finally made it back in one piece without falling into a ditch.


Resting after conquering Pyramid Hill

Once back we all freshened up and then relaxed for a bit playing with the kids. The original plan was to do a bit of star gazing before dinner and a movie but as it was cloudy we couldn’t really see anything except for the moon and that was also mostly covered, so we just fooled around for a bit while Tarun and Aditi tried to get the projector and sound system working for an outdoor movie night. Tarun had brought a good collection of movies to choose from and the majority (or at least the loudest) wanted to watch a horror movie, because that would have been a lot of fun. Unfortunately Tarun’s hard-disk’s connector cable died so we only had a choice between two movies and we choose ‘Three Idiots’. This was the first time I have attempted to watch a movie during a trek and to be honest I wasn’t in big favor of it initially but it was quite enjoyable.


Our Movie Hall [PC: Tarun]

We watched half the movie and then stopped to do a bit of star Gazing as Nikhitha & Mahesh noticed the sky was finally clear enough. Unfortunately we were only able to see the moon clearly as Jupiter was not cooperating in getting focused. We spent quite a lot of time just chatting and watching the stars which they both worked on getting the telescope aligned.


Trying to find the moon at 1am [PC: Nimisha]

After the star gazing session we all decided to sleep outside in the open itself as the cabins felt a little hot as compared to outside and since there were no mosquitoes choosing between overheating or getting eaten alive wasn’t a concern either. Most of the night was quite comfortable but it got chilly in the morning to the point where 3 of us (Me, Shahrukh and Shashank) ended up sharing a blanket (all of us were too lazy to walk up to the cottage to get another blanket).


Sharing a blanket as it was cold!

After a heavy breakfast me and Jani spent the morning lazing around the campsite while the rest of the folks attempted the second trek (I had a twisted back). They all survived the trek and came back in one piece in time for lunch which was again quite scrumptious. Post lunch we went ‘fishing’ in a nearby river. Our expectations were that the water was deep enough to swim in so folks who wanted to fish would do so and the rest of us were planning to swim. Unfortunately due to the heat and the fact that the dam upstream hadn’t let out much water that day, the water was only knee deep at the deepest end. ๐Ÿ™ We still spent some time soaking our feet in the water and tried to get a fish pedicure. In the end we decided to call it a bust and walked back to the bus.

While walking back we saw a mango orchard next to the path and decided to pick a few mangoes to snack on. Me, Aditi and Nimisha were picking the mangoes when all three got an electric shock from the fence as it was an electrified fence which we didn’t know when we started picking the mangoes. Thankfully it was a mild shock but still stung. We collected our bounty of 3-4 mangoes and gave up on collecting more and boarded the bus to go for a coracle ride. Since that was on the same river as the fishing spot the water was not inviting enough to tempt us so we had a whole lot of coconut water and then started back to camp to collect our stuff before leaving for Bangalore. Just as we started back to camp it started raining heavily and we enjoyed the cool rain during the drive. Thankfully it stopped raining by the time we got back to camp and we avoided getting drenched while loading our luggage into the bus.

The drive back was fairly uneventful and while a lot of the folks slept some of us talked the entire time and I am surprised that none of the folks sleeping threw things at us to shut us up. We reached Bangalore by 9:30pm and as we hadn’t had dinner yet and didn’t want the trip to end some of us decided to have dinner together at my place. We picked up food from a restaurant near my place and spent the next few hours chatting away. We would have stayed up longer but everyone had office the next day so we had to call it a night with a heavy heart.

I would recommend the trek to anyone who doesn’t mind staying in a place that doesn’t allow smoking and drinking but serves the most amazing and simple food.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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