Sringeri & Horanadu!

I had been to Mangalore during Dasara. This time I choose to drive the not so good but fastest route via shiradi ghat, it took me home for lunch with a nice drive of 6.5 hours. On October 7th, as the clock ticked 6:30 in the morning, we left home. We drove the Mulki-Padubidri-Nitte-Karkala-Kerekatte road. Thanks to an early breakfast at home, our next stop was near the forest check post at around 8:30AM for some tea and nice spicy biscuits. We reached Sringeri by around 9:30 AM. At Sringeri, the temple was a little crowded due to holidays. We also got to see the palaki meravnige of swamy. The stone carved chain at one corner of the temple entrance is a major attraction as it is completely carved and not assembled.

Another attraction here is thousands of fishes that come very close to proximity of humans to fetch their free food offered by devotees.

From here we drove to Horanadu. On the way my good friends; the Muslim neighbors have some land and a shop. Musta, Jamila and her husband were there and we decided to stop by to say hello. I was hoping to fill my car trunk with some coffee stem for some craft work but unfortunately as I had not informed earlier they could not arrange the workers to get a stem cut and dried. Long ago, sometime during college I had brought one such coffee stem from there and polished it before painting. As kindest of people they are who are always so generous to guests, they offered us a bottle of local honey obtained from a friend. We next drove to Horanadu. After a quick darshana, we had good lunch at the temple. One of the common things you may notice in South Canara and Malnad regions is that temples offer free lunch throughout the year to its devotees.

After lunch we drove to Kalasa, another nice old Kalaseshwara temple awaited there on a small hill overlooking the small town. We also visited a small tea shop near a tea estate on the way back.

The drive back was via Kudremukh; once a thriving township with an iron ore plant and a dam but now close to being a ghost town midst those beautiful evergreen forest and Western Ghats. The scenery was amazing. A light drizzle made the drive even more pleasant.

On the way back we stopped at Bajagoli for some good Mangalore style snacks like – Biscuit roti, goli bajje and buns. We took the Moodabidri route and stopped at the 1000 pillar basadi for a short visit before driving back via Moodabidri-Kateel-Kinigoli- Halenagadi route.