I am totally bored with writing this huge travelogue, especially because it is now almost a month since I had the vacation. I guess, I should have started writing this the day I returned, but unfortunately, I was swamped with work when I returned to the office and couldn’t get to this for some time.
But anyway, for the record:
Sunday 25th May –
Visited Somnathpur. Very old temple practically in ruins. Taken over by the ASI, it is a must see place for those interested in historic monuments, especially temples. The architecture inside the main temple is stunning. There is this representation of the various stages of the blooming of the vaazhai poo (flower of a plantain) in the ceiling and words and pictures cannot describe it. A very clear case of MUST SEE TO EXPERIENCE.
Monday 26th May –
Reached Madikeri the previous night. Monday morning was spent at Bhagamandala where there is a mini sangamam of Cauvery, some other stream and a mythological river as usual. A small peaceful place up in the hills and has a Kerala style temple nearby.
After Bhagamandala, it was then off to Tala Cauvery, which is considered to be the origin point for the river Cauvery. Strictly speaking, this small well which is depicted as the origin, may not be the real one. But for many many years now, it has been considered to be the starting point and so we will leave it at that. And all said and done, it is really difficult to trace the origin of a river, so we shall leave civilization to continue treating this point as the origin for the problems between Kannadigas and Tamizhs!
After a small break in the afternoon, we went to a place called Raja’s Seat. This is a small park and has a lot of benches on one end of it. We get to see a very good view of the valley from this place.
After this, we went to the Omkareshwara temple. This is again a small temple but a very neat one. It has a superb little water tank which has really fat fish roaming around. I took a picture of this water body with a small mandapam in the middle. I consider it to be one of my good photos because the lighting was good and also, I did some really good centering of that mandapam!
I think we retired for the day after doing some shopping for spices.
Tuesday 27th May –
The plan for the day was to go visit the tourist spots down-hill. We went to Dubare Elephant camp. Again, this is situated along the banks of Cauvery when it reaches the plains from the mountains. It is a very scenic place filled with rocks and the river flowing at fairly slow pace. Apparently the speed increases drastically after the monsoon sets in, but at the time we went, it was quite slow. As the name of the place contains the words “elephant camp”, one can see a lot of elephants albeit with mahouts. They give a bath to these elephants on the river bank and also allow the visitors to join the elephant bathing. My mother was a gleeful participant and scrubbed one elephant for a couple of minutes. We tried to go on the elephant ride, but unfortunately, these authorities said that the wait was going to be very long and so we had to skip it.
After spending a very pleasing and peaceful time there, we set off to the next spot called Nisargha Dhaama. It is basically a bamboo grove, again on the banks of the Cauvery. This place is quite peaceful and there is an elephant ride here too. The wait time was much less here and so was the time spent on the elephant. After the ride was completed, we fed cucumbers to the elephant and also to the deer in an enclosure nearby.
It was lunch time and once that was done, we took off to the Tibetan settlement nearby. These refugees (at least that’s how they started off in these parts of India) have established quite a big settlement. The main tourist attraction here is their monastery. I haven’t been to Tibet and would like to assume that this is how Tibetan monasteries would look like. These were very big structures and well painted in bright colors and a liberal sprinkling of gold – plating or paint. I don’t know. Inside one of these temples, are 3 statues plated in gold. Each of these is 58-60 feet tall and is for Lord Buddha and his principle disciples according to Tibetan beliefs. The walls of the temple feature a lot of painting that apparently depict a lot of Buddhist philosophy. All in all, it is another experience that gets classified under “different”.
Afterwards, we went back up the hill to see the Abbey falls. Abbey in the local tribal speak actually means waterfall and so in a way this was “waterfall waterfall”. The trek leading up to the falls is quite an interesting one. You are actually walking along a fenced path which has a lot of coffee plants on either side for a long stretch. After that, it is plain wild growth and features VERY tall trees and a lot of foliage that only a botanist or a local can identify. You get to hear a lot of insects buzzing too and I believe, there are many leeches of the blood sucking kind available in abundance. After this trek, you get to see a small but beautiful waterfall of probably 70 feet height. This is not one of those “bathing falls” and so I was able to enjoy watching the waterfall. We then called it a day since the trek really drained the energy left with my parents.
Wednesday 28th May –
We started off to Mysore and before reaching the station, had a very brief stopover at Nanjangud which is yet another old (but active) Shiva temple the visit was very brief because my mother got very paranoid about missing our train. So we rushed back to the main city, had a quick lunch at the other Dasaprakash and then reached the station with some 40 minutes to spare. We paid off the driver and gave him a good tip as well.
The Shatabdi train to Chennai from Mysore started on time. My parents thoroughly enjoyed their first trip on the Shatabdi. A point to note: there are juice packets/biscuit packets etc. that were given in the train, still lying inside my fridge!
So, this concludes my travelogue for the real vacation I took after many years. I returned to office on the 29th with full excitement and energy and had everything drained out barely 2 hours after I opened my mail box!
No comments:
Post a Comment