Shimoga… The Beautiful face of Shiva…

The last week end of 9-10 September I spent roaming around the Shimoga and around. It was a short and sweet picnic with only 6 of us around.

It was perhaps first picnic where our small group of 6 traveled in three different units. I traveled in a first class sleeper bogie. This was first time in my life that I traveled in those typical old Hindi movie style bogies with a door for every compartment and all.

We reached Shimoga early morning. We had only two days so without wasting much time we started off with the endeavor.

In local language Shimoga means Face of Shiva.

This entire region is lush green forest. Even when I am going about various places and all, one can stop anywhere along the route. Entire region boasts the full beauty of the Western Ghats. It’s green and only green everywhere where... it may be the thick Teak wood jungles… or the Rice fields… or the coconut or betel nut farms…

The very first place to visit was the Gajanur Dam. Nothing special; it’s a normal dam. The only specialty was that this village is associated with kannada actor Rajkumar. This is the place where he was abducted by Veerappan.

Just ahead of the dam is the Sakrebyle Elephant training camp. We could not see the elephants being trained… but we got to see them bathing in the dam water. Also at this place I got to see what I would like to call forefather of the reinforcement process. The houses were built with mud and reinforced with Bamboo.

From there we went to another place….Mandagadde Bird sanctuary… again I did not find much interesting since I don’t have much knowledge about different types of birds…

But still it was a good site to see hundreds of birds with their nests and all.

Next came the Thyavarekoppa tiger-lion safari. Again this too was no different from the various other safaris… but the most interesting point I noticed was that, the animals here were too passive towards the tourists. At one time our vehicle stopped literally a few inches away from a sleeping tiger. That animal did not even bother to move a bit. Same story repeated with those lions.

From there we left for the Famous Jog falls…

It was around 5 pm in the evening when we reached there. We had our arrangements for overnight stay in the same vicinity, so we decided to spend some time and then come again in the morning.

All of a sudden it started raining there. I enjoyed the rain like anything. After a year this was the first heavy rainfall I was experiencing… so the jeans… sport shoes nothing mattered… it was raining for almost an hour and I was out there for entire period.

Next day we went to the Linganamakki Dam. To be frank we could not go to the actual dam. But the areas surrounding the dam were too beautiful. So we spent some time there.

From the dam we again went to the falls. Due to the rains earlier day, the falls had good amount of water flowing. After spending some time there we left for the Murudeshwar.

The route to Murudeshwar is a really beautiful one. It takes you from the high hills of the Jog falls to the seashore where one can see the huge idol of lord Shiva from miles away.

On the way we visited one place called Idagunji. This place is famous for the Ganapati temple. Since they were not allowing photography inside, while others entered the temple with some religious thoughts… my sole purpose was to take a snap of the idol. I came out of the temple with a snap of the idol in my phone camera…

After spending some time we had to leave the Murudeshwar early at around 4 00 PM because we had no shortcut to reach Shimoga and had to all the back first to Jog falls and then back by the same route we came.

By around 8 00 PM we reached Shimoga and after having some roaming around the city we left for Bangalore by train at 10 00 PM…