Sivanasamudra
Posted by Seshu Thalluri on October 2, 2007
After lot of deliberation on a day of political turmoil in the city – 2nd Oct, we set upon a trip to Shivanasamudra. We started our trip around 7:30 in the morning, which is pretty early for us. We had managed to buy some snacks the day before. So, we could race along the Mysore Highway pretty much until 9:00, without a break. We usually stop at the Kamath Hotel or Cafe Coffee Day for breakfast. But, on a national holiday, it looked quite time consuming to try these joints, which are very overcrowded. So, we stopped at a decent eatery on the highway, which was 2-3km before Kamath Hotel. Had a quick snack and continued along the Mysore Highway. My friends advised us against taking the kanakpura route due to bad roads. Instead, we took the Ramanagaram, Channapatna, Maddur route. At Mandya, we took a diversion to the left, which leads to Malavalli. The road from Malavalli is not so good. A couple of long stretches about a km or two were extremely bad. I was just praying that the car will get us through the bad stretch without any puncture. Road to such a popular destination should have been better !
After some searching, we reached the first waterfalls, Gananachukki Falls around 11:00. The crowd was just coming in and we though we reached at the right time. The view of the falls was simply amazing. We completely forgot about the bad roads and everything else. We were just there, enjoying the falls. Its been a while since I have seen these falls at its full steam. We just didn’t want to move from there for a couple of hours.
After that, we headed to Barachukki Falls. And this was even more spectacular, with water gushing at full steam ! One good thing here is, there are no rails along, which block the view of the falls like Gananachukki. So, we felt as if we were very close to the falls, even from a long distance. It was a great experience and we spent a hour here.
We wanted to reach home before dark, as I am not so comfortable driving on the highway at night. So, we started back along the same route around 3pm and stopped at Kamath Hotel for a lunch-snack break. Finally, we reached bangalore before 6pm, which was what I was aiming for. Overall, it was an amazing trip and we will surely not miss the falls during monsoon next year.
