Youngest Daughter’s Town...

Continuing with my series of travels… One more new place….Once again the mesmerizing Western Ghats…

This time it was Chikamangalur and around. Chikamangalur literally means Youngest Daughter’s town and hence the title.

We had made a very ambitious plan for three days that is 30th September,1st and 2nd October. Although the plan was great… no homework had gone into it… no planning… just ad hoc decision… booked tickets and left for the destination. End the there were quiet a lot lessons to be learnt.

As expected… trouble started right after we landed in Chikamamgalur. It was a three day weekend and in addition police had beefed up security for Vijaya Dashami as well as Datta Jayanti (Chikamangalur is surrounded by many holy places). All this had resulted in all the lodges being fully booked since police dept had also booked lodges for staff. After roaming around whole city we finally managed to find a lodge with a room available… we decided to make it base camp for next three days.

On the first day we went to Kemmannugundi… A beautiful hill station. One needs at least a whole day to fully enjoy this place. We started in the morning for the hill station. The distance in map was given as about 50 KM.. so we had expected an hour to reach. Bt again… the hilly region ensured that journey too double time.

One more handicap we faced was that since we were only 3 people… hiring a sumo became too costly. So we decided to travel by local transport. This obviously resulted in lot of wastage of time. Furthermore last return transport from Kemmannugundi was available at 4 00 pm… so we had to leave our adventure halfway… we could not visit the Hebbe Falls.

Learning from this, we decided to start a bit early for the next destination… Kudremukh.
Again…. Just 80 km on map. We started at midnight 12 30 by local transport. And as expected reached early morning… but it was a bit too early. There was absolutely no one at bus stand except a few private transport drivers. First we decided to spend the time at bus stand but later we changed plan and went to Kalase.. a nearby village and nearest plave where one could find a lodge. The plan was to get refreshed and collect some info.

We had a lot of expectations from Kudremukh. It during initial research before travel, we had found a lot of information about trekking opportunities at Kudremukh. We made a lot of enquiries at Kalse expecting that there should be some facilities to get trekking permission from local forest dept. but we were told to go and get permission from the forest department at Kudremukh.

The photo above is of a Tea Garden in Kudremukh Area.

So finally we went back to Kudremukh.

We visited the forest office. And here came the biggest shock.
They had stopped permitting the treks. The reason? Rise in naxalite problem in the Jungles. This was my first direct encounter with the naxalite problem. Till today I was only reading about it in the news papers.

Frustrated… we asked them if there is anything at all that we could see under such condition.

They suggested visiting a nearby waterfall “Hanumangundi falls”.
We had already wasted a precious day… there was no point in returning back immediately… so something is better than nothing. We went to the water falls.
The snap beside is of Hanumangundi Water Falls

We spent some time there. While coming back we faced the biggest travel setback ever during this travel. There was no transport available for two hours!!!!

We returned back from Kudremukh to chikamangalur late evening… again 4-5 hours journey. We had not slept properly since last two days because of travel.

Next day we were to travel back to Bangalore by 3 00 bus.

We decided to spend the morning visiting nearby places... mainly temples. We identified two temples that we thought we could visit and come back before 2 00 pm.

One of them was the Belevadi temple.

Chikamangalur was under the Hoyasala dynasty from 11th till 14th century. This area is full of temples. Beautiful temples... We had planned to visit Belevadi temple and the Marle Temple which were nearby.

While going there we were expecting a normal south Indian temple with so many people around. But what we came across was entirely different. There was no one in the temple.
The temple sculptures were too good. Below is a photo of temple's interior.

One good thing we observed was that they were trying to restore the structure of the old temple. They were trying to do it much the same way as the original builders by using similar ingredients.

The priest there took us around the temple explaining the stories carved in the stones. After he learned about our plans to visit Marle temple next, he strongly and repeatedly recommended us to go to Halebid and see the temple there.

Initially we were reluctant given our time constraint. But after repeated recommendations from the priest, we decided to give it a try. He gave us all the details about going there, and we set out on the way to Halebid.

Based on our prior experience with local transport we were too skeptic. But this time we were wrong. Transport was good. We changed the transport twice on our way to Halebid but it was a smooth process. We never waited for more than 10 minutes.
The priest was right in his recommendation. If Belavadi was good… Halebid was simply awesome. I had never imagined that sculptures can be made to such minute details. The efforts of those unknown artists were clearly visible after more 600 years… after so many devastations from Muslim rulers and the nature…. It had withstood all… Photograph below is a panoramic view of one of the sides of the Hoysaleswara temple.

Halebid was the capitol city of the Hoyasala Rulers.

During my last visit to Murudeshwar, I had seen a hige new “Gopuram” built for the Murudeshwar temple. I can not resist temptation to compare the devotion and imagination of these ancient artists with those useless people working at Murudeshwar. On the entire Gopuram being built which is almost 10 floors high, one could count a small bunch of sculptures that were mass produced and put everywhere along the entire Gopuram. As if they were doing it just for the sake of doing…
Just look at the photo beside and you will understand how much attention has been given to the details.

We returned to the Chikamangalur Bus stand by 2 00 pm as planned. And finally set out on the return journey by 3 00 pm bus….

This picnic was not a well planned one. And as a result we could not see one place fully but too many places incomplete… certainly I shall plan and visut the same region again…
Well planned… and very specific…