Exploring Hampi

Hampi, the once pride of Vijayanagara empire is now nothing but ruins. On one side you will admire the architectural beauty this place has to offer and at the same time you can’t help but feel bad thinking how awesome it would have been if it was not destroyed. And as most blogs have pointed out, Hampi is to be explored and not toured.

A collage of few of sculptures found in various places

San Francisco

If you watch SciFi movies, then you would have definitely seen San Francisco. That is the city that has gone through hell. Well, if not anything then the Golden Gate Bridge deserves to be mentioned. So far it has gone through alien attacks, terminators, apes, mutants, kaiju and even the 2012 apocalypse. I was in the city and can assure that in spite of all this, the city is fine and awesome. Don’t trust me? See it for yourself.

California 101

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about my trip to Hong Kong and Vancouver.  Not even a month has elapsed since I came back and I was asked to travel to our company headquarters in California for 7 weeks. Yeah, my company is making me a globetrotter. The bay area, as it is called, is kind of like Bangalore. Pleasant weather, IT crowd, traffic, food from all the cuisines and a lot of people speaking Telugu and Tamil (not kidding). For  people who do not know about the Silicon Valley, this post would serve as an introduction and for rest of the folks Route-101 is the freeway that connects the cities in the valley (see what I did there with the title).

Manchanabele - breakfast ride !!

It was just one week from our previous Belur-Chikkamagluru-Halebidu trip and Sagar already started missing highways and bike rides :D. Early morning rides would be best though getting up is a problem for most of us and that too on a Sunday.  We wanted to explore some closest gateways to Bangalore, Manchanbele and  Dodda Aladha Mara roughly being 50 kilometers from Bangalore was perfectly fitting our requirement.

Halebidu - Bike trip Day 3

Day 3: Sunday 23rd, August 2015

New day began with discussions on which places to visit. Since major attractions of Chikkamagaluru were already covered on previous day, we kept Halebidu and Sakleshpur on the list but still uncertain if we need to extend the trip to another day covering even Mudigere. Finally we decided to visit Halebidu (36 kms) - Hoysaleshwara temple, Kedareshwara temple and Basadi Halli being main attractions here. 

Chikkamagaluru - Bike trip Day 2

Day 2: Saturday 22nd, August 2015

After visiting Shravanabelagola and Belur on Day 1, it was time to explore Chikkamagaluru - famous for its serene, green forests and tall mountains. Chikkamagaluru takes its name from the word "Chikkamagala Uru" which translates to "younger daughter's town" in Kannada language. We decided to visit major places: Mullayanagiri Peak, Baba Budangiri Dattathreyapeeta & Manikyadhara falls.

Shravanabelagola & Belur - Bike trip Day 1

Bengaluru (aka Bangalore) has lot of weekend gateways and Chikkamagaluru (known as 'Coffee Land' of Karnataka) located in the foothills of Mullayanagiri range is one of the beautiful place that everyone must visit. After lot of discussions in whatsapp group, we (Prashanth, Sagar, Naresh and myself) came up with 3 days bike-trip plan to Shravanabelagola – Belur – Sakleshpur – Chikkamagaluru – Halebidu. Since weather forecast predicted rainfall in these places we decided to take only three bikes for four people, one being pillion rider.