Field camp at mukkola, near Vizhinjam, trivandrum, 1964

06 Feb Field camp at mukkola, near Vizhinjam, trivandrum, 1964

The first batch of msc geology students or the class of 1965 was taken to the field camp at mukkola, down from Vizhinjam. Mukkola is at the intersection of balaramapuram- Vizhinjam rd and mukkola venganoor rd. The place we lodged was a small palm leaf thatched , ex- tea shop. The spot was identified by a fellow teache and friend of mr. Thomas, one of my batch mates who taught high school at vidura NE of nedumangad.
The other members are besides me bhaskaran Nair, KK Ramachandran, and krishnamurthy.
The leader teacher theoretically was Rajendran Nair. But in fact all the four teachers like prof Kk menon, KVK Nair and Raju Philip came to field camp off and on.
The students formed two groups, viz, thrivikramji, Thomas and Ramachandran to work on the Tertiary sediments exposed in the cliff section at karichal and the other had krishnamurthy and bhaskaran Nair..
The camp was interesting, the field studies were much more interesting and finally our evening bath in a neighborhood stream was all the more exciting. We the students had only one towel to be shared but the teacher guide in the Rajendran Nair had his own separate towel.
So we the students had to wait till the veil of darkness to setin that we could go skinny dipping.
But we never carried any flash light and that indeed saved and protected our nudity while bathing.
Day work was tough, there was lot of climbing to do to collect the samples from the lithounits.
In fact it was crawling. Those days the bakshore cliff was the open pooing place for both genders as well as all ages. With our presence the older and mature ones in the crowd got their jobs done in the early morning. But our presence did not deter the kids.
After the finalization of the report for the msc course, prof. Menon came up with a paper on the sequence of the karichal cliff section and it was printed in the bulletin of the geological society of india.
Well that was indeed a great learning experience in every sense of the term. Salute to all the teachers who mentored us and encouraged us in the field.