I was in 8th class when, our school was in Survey of India campus, at Uppal, Hyderabad. There was a hill of granite rocks it was called Elugu Gutta (17.405088, 78.547603) about two kilometers distance from the school. It was about 100 meters in height. The view of the city was beautiful from the top. The top of the hill had a benchmark too. There were many caves and tunnels inside this hill, formed because of joints in the granite rocks and the rubble. The tunnels were like a straight-line-maze. Very little light reaches the floor through small spaces in the roof. It was very steep. One huge boulder was there at the top, separated by a deep open joint of hardly two feet wide. We need to cross on to the main boulder over a stone stuck in the joint. I was fascinated by the deep valley created by the joint which was about 30 meters deep.

I used to visit this place many times during my school days. I was there one day with my classmates. We friends had a challenge about who will reach the bottom of that valley by climbing down. None of us knew how to reach the bottom of this joint between the rocks. We literally ran like monkeys but without any skills of rappelling. Crawled, jumped and ran. Among all of my friends, with great difficulty, I managed to reach the bottom. This was one of the most dangerous challenges for me. If I slipped and fallen, it would have been fatal.

During another visit with my classmates, while climbing down we saw some youth who were collecting some dry grass, sticks and waste papers. We asked, what were they doing? They said there is a very dark cave and they are trying to enter into it. For light, they were collecting the materials. They were older than us and were from the Government School, Uppal. They said we could accompany them, if interested, to explore the cave. We liked the idea, but we did not know how it would be inside. We all slowly crawled inside. After reaching some distance it was pitch dark, they tried to light the material bought with us. The fire was there for some time we could see, it was a huge cave inside. But suddenly, the fire went off and there was so much smoke. Could not light the material again. Everyone suffocated with smoke. By touching the walls, we barely managed and came out of the cave. Some of us had bruises and lots of dirt on our dress. My new pant was also torn in some places.

It became an interesting place to explore the natural rock formations. One of the caves was favourite, I used to visit always. There were lots of bats hanging in the cave. I can even now feel the pungent ammonia smell from the excreta of the bats. These are the beautiful memoirs of rock climbing and adventures during the school days.