A visit to Melkote..

It seems my friends here in Bangalore had been planning to go to this place called Melkote for quite sometime now. But the plan left to be executed from a long time. A very quick exchange of mails followed early last week and it was decided that we all travel to this place on Saturday the 26th of Jul. I waited a couple of days impatiently for this day. Finally when it was Friday i was more than happy that the next day would be a long ride and a day out on the roads riding my bike again with my pals. But then, Friday turned out to be a nightmare when the whole city went berserk when reports started to pour that there was a bomb blast in Bangalore. I initially thought nah, this was not happening in Bangalore. But then this was a reality as the TV started blaring the flash news of bomb blasts. The singular somehow became plural and then it didn't take much time for the news to pour in on the serial blasts. Slowly the number of blasts started to increase and i counted till 7 and then i closed my ears. ;) All my colleagues left early as the management deiced to close down the office. But this bomb sounded disaster for the peace loving city and to our trip as well. We thought it was rather wise to drop the plans for Saturday and sit cozily inside the comfort of our dwellings. By evening when the picture on the blasts became much clearer it was obvious to us that all the blasts were nothing major in terms of damage and somehow were glorified crackers. Though some people were injured seriously and there were a couple of deaths, the damage done was not that disastrous. Hence we had to rethink on our canceling the trip late in the evening. Later we deiced it was OK if we could leave our place early.

And so we got up early on Saturday to a bright sunny day and so the 6 of us on 3 motorbikes started off towards Melkote on Bangalore-Mysore state highway. After a brief stop in ramnagar for breakfast we made good ground to Melkote. The roads were wonderful with very less traffic and the distance of 130 kms were not that tiring. The road stretch from mandya to Melkote was a bit bad at some places as the roads were not maintained that well. The place Melukote is ancient temple city and has its place in history. Get some information here. Interesting!
The Yoga-Narasimha Swamy Temple is situated atop a big boulder on a hill. Once on top on the hill, the view is astounding and it takes a few steps to be alighted as more than half the way to the top is kept motor able. We also visited the Kalyani or Pushkarani Pond situated in the foot of the hill which is quite big and beautifully constructed. The Cheluvanarayana Swamy Temple nearby is also know for having a lot of devotees. A visit to this temple and later we decided to explore around Melkote. The place has a huge stone pillared entrance built during vijayanagara emporer's rule. A lot of movies have been shot here with song sequence from recent movie Guru also been shot in this location. A small garden and couple of ponds surround this monument. We stopped by the sides of one of these ponds to have a some Puliyogare that we had packed from a vendor near the temple. Eating it we realized that it was one of the tastiest puliyogare we all had ever tastiest. The sweet pongal was also extremely good. And this lead to us following back our path to the vendor and ordering in for more of the eateries. Please do not miss to eat puliyogare from an Iyengar serving here in Melkote. You'll know what i'm saying if you taste it sometime. :)











The vendor was kind enough to let us know that if we wished there was a large lake near by that we could visit. It was called Keretonnur and was about 15km from the temple. We thought we might visit the place as well as we had lots of time to spare before we planned to return. So we all set out to this huge lake that covered a enormous 1390 acres of land. Huge by what I've seen for a lake. Nice place to spend an evening. To reach this place take the road that takes you to mysore from Melkote and take a left once you reach Madeshwarapura. A 3km on the same road gets you to the lake. Shrirangapattana is just 15km from here and we had thoughts on visitng this place to visit the palace of Tipu Sulthan but a couple of my friends turned the thought down and hence we decided to head back. It was saddening to head back when we knew that the places were close by. An architectural Marvell called Somanathapura temple also close by was indeed close by and we had to skip visiting this place as the skies were dark with clouds starting to look very dark. And on our way back it rained cats and dogs once we crossed mandya. A half an hour later once the weather cleared and we managed to ride along to Bangalore without much delay. Another of those wonderful days came to an end with a 300km round trip
and i was more satisfied than i ever was. Enjoy some of the pictures I've posted of the place.