Nagarhole - Mysore - Srirangapatna

Trip members: Karthik and family
Trip date:  10 and 11 Mar 2018
Trip Plan : Chennai - Mysore - Nagarhole - Mysore - Srirangapatna - Mysore - Chennai

A weekend trip to around Mysore and around with family.

Day-1

Chamundi hills and temple. The temple opens for dharshan by 07:30 AM. The temple is one of the 18 Sakthi Peetams. One has to go through the hills for 8 kms to reach the Chamundeswari temple. There are lot of parking slots near the temple. The day was Rama Navami and some appreciable crowd was expected. There are paid and free dharshans - paid are for Rs.30 and Rs.100. Free dharshan was obviously very crowded and estimated to take more than 1 hour time for dharshan. We opted for Rs.30 dharshan and were able to have a very good dharshan.

Srirangapatna is a river island on river Cauvery, around 20 kms from Mysore - a drive of around 30 minutes. There are several places to see in Srirangapatna worth more than half a day to spend.

• Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple
• Dariya Daulat Palace
• Gumbaz Burial Chamber
• Ruins of Lal Mahal palace
• Tipu's Death Place
• Jama Masjid
• Captain Bailey's Dungeon
• Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary

Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple - is one of the popular tourist spots similar to Srirangam in Tamilnadu across the river of Cauvery. Being Sunday, the temple was crowded with tourists and locals. The temple is quite big hosting Lord Venkatramana. The temple hosts beautiful Hoysala architecture based pillars in the main prakaram of the temple. It took almost an hour for us to complete the dharshan and go around the temple. It was a quite hot day and tender coconuts helped us.

Yelagiri

Trip members: Karthik, Sankar, Murugan, Prashant and Sathish Raja
Trip date:  10 and 11 Mar 2018
Trip Plan : Chennai - Yelagiri - Ambur - Chennai

Day-1

A quickly planned weekend trip to Yelagiri - first time, being so close to Chennai. Yelagiri is around 210 kms from Tambaram. On the Bangalore highway, after crossing Ambur and just before Vaniyambadi, watch out for a signboard for Yelagiri - 22 kms. Take a left at this exit. It is easy to miss this left and if you overshoot this you would reach the Vaniyambadi toll station in about 1km. After 1 km, turn left at this junction, there's a sign board pointing towards Yelagiri. The hill station has beautiful hair pin bends and nice drift in temperature in the evenings. The day time is quite sunny in all weather like the plains.

We started from Chennai around 6 AM and took the route of Tambaram - Manimangalam - Sriperumpudur - Vellore - Ambur - Yelagiri. We stopped at Hotel Sakthi Ganapathy in Kancheepuram bye pass around 7:30. The restaurant never disappoints - pongal, vadas, idlies, dosas, pooris and coffee. All were good and satisfactory.

The hill station does not have too many places to see; however, a pleasant place in the evenings. The hill hosts an artificial lake with boating facilities, a park, Lord Murugan temple and then one more - Swamimalai. We reached Yelagiri around 10:45 AM. We stopped by the Punganoor Lake - Car parking is available at Rs.20 per car and boating is available - Rs.50 per person for row boat and Rs.25 for kids. Entrance ticket to the area is Rs.10 per person and per camera. Boating is open from 09:30 AM to 5:30 PM. We hired a row boat - around 20 minutes of going around the lake and taking few snaps around.

We then, went into Thrill valley adventure park - near to the lake. They had a good list of adventures to do - Human slingshot, Paintball, Zurfing, Parallel zip lines, ATV, Kids Zorbing, rope bridge and rope course. Few were Rs.100 and few at Rs.200 per attempt per person. We bought tickets for rope ziping and Zorbing. Zip lining was preferred first by the instructors. It was a very good experience - 200m of Zip lining. I did that twice and nice experience. For Zorbing - all 5 of us got into one ball in a small pond - and it was all Harrakiri ! Unable to stand and were rolling all over. Wow !!! Ufff ..... come on .... stand up .... I am rolling !! ..... ooohhhhh ... The fun was unlimited and we ended up very tired.

After the adventure all we needed was a good lunch and some rest. We checked in hotel Kumararaja Palace - booked rooms earlier by Makemytrip. The Hotel is just awesome, very cool checkin at reception. We had booked non-AC and upgraded the same to AC with a top-up of Rs.600. Big, clean, and spacious rooms. No complaints rooms were the order of the place. Very comfy and reachable to swimming pool. The water in the swimming pool was also very good.

We went out for lunch. There are not may restaurants in Yelagiri and just settle down to once that you see. We landed at Hotel Golden Restaurant. We ordered rotis, jeera rice, dhall and subji. They were ok and no issues - edible food was greatly appreciated in these localities and this was one of them. We then returned back to the hotel and enjoyed rest of the afternoon in the swimming pool. Later, in the evening, we just went by random roads to enjoy some sunset view and we were not disappointed.  We went close to the Shiva temple and enjoyed a beautiful Sunset.

We then visited the Yelagiri nature park - entrance of Rs.15 per adult and Rs.5 per kid. There is also musical fountain - separate tickets for Rs.25 and Rs.5 respectively at 7 PM. We went around the park for almost an hour and had dinner in a restaurant nearby. Hotel Food corner - they took close to 1 hour to serve dosas for all of us - food was ok; but, since we had all the time in the world, it was affordable.

Day - 2

Started the day around 6:30 and went for a short walk nearby Kumararaja palace - it was definitely refreshing and mildly cold. After enjoying the buffet breakfast, we went to all corners of the hill station. We spent close to 1 hour meeting all ends of Yelagiri - filled with all guest houses and small farms.

We then stopped by Lord Murugan temple - hosting the temple and a good view point. One had to walk and climb around 50 steps to reach a steep climb of a small hill and have dharshan of Lord Murugan. We spent around 20 minutes and then enjoyed the views around.

We then returned back to the rooms around 11:30 AM and checked out; and started back to Chennai.
Enroute, we stopped by at the view point to see great views from the hair pin bends.

We had lunch at Ambur. Biryani and veg food at Hotel Sai Sangeet in Ambur was the meals in store for us. Hotel Sai Sangeet- around 200m from the NH - served was good food - soups, starts, valaipo pakoda, parathas, paneer gravies and meals. They were all good and enjoyable.

We reached back Chennai (Tambaram) by 4 PM after the memorable trip.