Jani Jermans – Travel Diaries

Now that the 2nd wave of Covid in India was nearing it’s end, we wanted to take a short break which would allow us to travel outside our house where we had been under lockdown for over three months. The blessing of being in Bangalore is there are quite a lot of places for sightseeing and treks around Bangalore. Due to Covid we were unable to for any treks and were missing them quite badly so we wanted to do a short trek that we could finish within a day and reach home before 7 PM as we had a weekday night curfew in Karnataka and a full weekend curfew due to which we couldn’t travel over the weekend.

Sur had found few options for us to explore and as usual we had to decide the location as Akanksha, Ayush and Shashank were fine with whatever we chose. So Sur finalized Huliyurdurga, which is hardly a 2 hours drive from Bangalore and the trek itself would take less than 2 hours to complete, which meant that would return to Bangalore by afternoon, as we wanted to avoid trekking under the scorching sun in the afternoon.

We started from home around 7 AM and reached the Huliyurdurga police station within 2 hours since we didn’t stop anywhere on the way due to covid. When traveling by car you should enter the Huliyurdurga Police station as the destination. Once you reach the station, there is a narrow concrete road right before the station on the right side which you need to take. This will take you through a cemetery on the right and you need to keep going straight. A few minutes drive will bring you to a fork in the road and you need to take the road on the right. This will take you through a narrow road between houses and you should keep going straight till you hit a dead end and you will see stairs going up. Park near the stairs and then proceed.

We parked the car close to the stairs and we started climbing. It took hardly 15-20 minutes to reach a small temple midway and then we had to follow the trail on the left to go to the top for a good view. We tried to sneak in and went close to the rock, from where we had to climb a little before we got a  great view, however due to non human activity for few months, there were quite a lot of plants have grown on the trail and blocked the path and some of them had thorns which was hard to ignore as they were very strong. So we had to discontinue midway and reached back to the temple.

Sur didn’t want to give up and thought we will try the right side of the trail, there we could only walk for 5 minutes which had an amazing view and we couldn’t go further as there was only place to crawl in the trail which we didn’t want to take a risk. So we stopped on that little rock and spend few minutes enjoying watching a chameleon, different colors of butterflies and lots of different birds. Still we were disappointed since we couldn’t complete the trek, however we were a little satisfied that we had a break and some fresh air amidst the greens. We had complete silence there since we went on a weekday and there was no one there except the 5 of us.

Then we came down the stairs as we were trying to find a place to sit for few minutes to have some snacks, we found a old temple ruin, which were getting renovated. So we sat in front of the temple and spend about 30 minutes relaxing and had some snacks. Except me none of them wanted to explore more since it was too sunny. Everyone started complaining about the heat and I couldn’t convince them to go around even though we could see few more old buildings around.

So we had to start back and due to covid we didn’t want to stop on the way, we headed straight home and reached back home by lunch time.

Even though this was micro trek, we were glad, we were just happy that we got some fresh air and few hours of drive outside after being locked in the house due to covid. We all are just waiting for our 2nd doses so that we feel more confident to travel further and explore more.

Until then please get vaccinated, stay safe and look out for your loved ones….