I wanted to go away from all the chaos and people. My mind commanded that I go away by myself on a holiday and I had to execute to the command immediately. There was work, there was college looming in the distance, there were wedding plans forming and everything was happening all at once. I had to break away.
I did just that. I booked a home stay at Chikmaglur, booked tickets and just took off. I went with a couple of backpacks, for my camera and laptop. The idea was to spend as much time possible with my new camera, to try and play with light and effects and use the features. I left on Wednesday afternoon and after a nice drive across fields and hills and village scenes unfolding as the bus rolled past.
I reached at around nine in the evening and my host was waiting with his car, the home stay was eight kilometers away from the town. It was pouring with rain and the whole earth was bathed in a dark green. As we neared the estate, the roads became hairpin bends and the coffee and pepper plantations beckoned.
The home stay was lovely. There was the main house where my hosts stayed and then there was the outhouse with the rooms where I was to stay. The rooms were very comfortable, simple and cozy. On the outside there was a huge lawn and the estate to the back, lovely flower gardens and even a barn up front. There were cypress trees and passion fruit creepers.
The folks were just so amazingly friendly and walking into their home just felt like I was visiting family. The dinner was out of this world and I pigged out enough to add a couple of inches overnight to my waist. I had the best veg biriyani ever and baingan ka bharta and there were also eggs, fresh cucumber from the garden and lots of homemade dahi. After which there was fruit salad and custard for dessert. I was a happy woman. I went off to sleep in my huge four poster bed wrapped in blankets, listening to the raindrops and crickets.
The plan was that I will wake up and finish my breakfast and leave for the tour of some peaks in the Kudremukh range. Breakfast was again a great spread with fresh passion fruit juice, bread and eggs and homemade marmalade with orange rind, there was also upma which was very well made. So, after tucking in well, I started for Mullengiri, the tallest peak in the range. I set off in a maroon indica, with a very cordial driver. We drove through amazing hairpin bends and the views were just absolutely stupendous. As we climbed higher, the mist engulfed us and we could just see a few feet ahead of us.
It was pouring as we climbed higher and the clouds were in my hair, little drops of water clinging onto the strands. There was a quaint little temple on the way back that was deserted and I stepped in, it was again covered in a mist, the whole feeling of being alone in a mist covered temple was just beyond words. The mist has an amazing quality to it, it feels like something with a life to it, its mysterious and the feeling of being enveloped in a mist is like being wrapped up in its finger touches.
We stopped at Kavikal Gandi and went on to see a few waterfalls and then went to another waterfall which had Suji Kal Neeru which means the water stems from a rock. The waterfall was nice and powerful but there were clothes strewn all over the place, which was because of a local belief that if you bathed in the falls and left behind a piece of your clothing, you’d be purged of all your sins.
The rolling hills, the green meadows interspersed with dense forests and of course the estates, all misty and lakes shimmering in the distance and reflecting the sun rays that filtered through the dense clouds. It was one of the best drives that I had ever had. Gaali Kere which translates to windy lake was the next stop and I had no idea what I was in store for. It was a huge lake on a peak, a mountain lake. The lake was huge and so entirely misted up, I could not see the other ends of it all. The surface of the lake was all soft and misty and had a strangely mysterious aura to it; the clouds were so dense that I could not see beyond a few feet. The pictures I got here were splendid.
After lunching alone in the town, I went back home and lazed; I finished a couple of books and even managed to do some writing. I had an evening snack and sat with the kids at my host’s house and helped them with their homework. We then went onto play and I was everything from a tree to a slide for them, they were six and two year old girls and by night they got so attached to me, I had to feed them dinner and coax the older one to sleep at her place and not tag along with me into the home stay.
After another sumptuous dinner and an equally nice breakfast the next day which was bright and sunny, I took off again and this time around it was to the temples of Badami, Belur and Halebidu. The first temple was a five hundred year old temple and was simple yet beautiful. Then there was the Veera Narayana temple at Badami which was nine hundred years old and also had the Yoga Narasimha and Krishna deities. The sculptures were so intricate and beautiful and the temple had the cool feeling of the stone structure it was. The feeling of wandering along the passages was just mind blowing.
Then there was Halebidu and Belur, which was again awe inspiring, the temples, the grounds, the sculpting the pillars, the light filtering into the dark passages inside the temples, the idols and the stories that the walls unfolded of years and years of life and people that had crossed these paths. The carvings and gentle and delicate, yet so powerful in effect.
Drunk in all the ardor of the temples, I returned after a quick lunch, alone again to the home stay. Then, with the whole family I went to Gandhi Park where the kids and i had the greatest time, chasing the rain, laughing and feeding fishes, all the tiny joys of life, relived. Then back home to another amazing dinner and a journey back to Bangalore, I felt like I had regained a few years that I had thought I had lost in the many pages of my life.
Here is the link to some of the pictures i clicked.
No comments:
Post a Comment