Our Project team was planning to go out from long time.. finally the day has come... we checked with many options like Wonderla etc.... I suggested trekking... then we googled for some good place ... after reviewing some blogs we finally decided Siddara Betta as it has trekking, temple and most importantly Caves.
The Place...Siddara Batta is a rocky hill 3660 feet above sea level. It is Sacred Place where many sadhus/Holy spiritual men made meditation and worship of Lord Shiva. We can still see some sadhus meditating here and some more are in samadhi state. Here is a famous temple situated at the Top of the Hill. Though the major crowd which visits here are pilgrims, this place is also interests for trekkers and other nature lovers. The main attractive spot here is the Lakshmi Cave, which is more than a kilometer deep and a visit to this cave is an adventure in itself.
The Plan... Our Team members - Ramesh, Kharibam, Mahesh, Preetam, Swapnil, Kowsalya, Vinod, Kavya, Sachin and me planned to meet in office near Mekhri circle on Friday, 10th Dec 2010 @ 7.15 AM. Other team mate Rimple missed this as he was on vacation. We all met at the office by 7.45AM. Mahesh arranged a Tempo Traveler for this purpose. We all get into this and started our journey.
Siddara Betta is around 12 Km from Koratagere in Tumkur district and is around 85 km away from the Bangalore (Mekhri circle).
We had our breakfast in Kamath hotel in Tumkur road on the way to Siddara betta. Nice Idly Vada and Dosas available there. We enquired for rice to parcel for lunch at hill top; we knew that there are no hotels available around Siddara betta. But it was not available at that time. So we started our journey back hoping to get lunch parcel in some daba on the way. We reached the flyover before Tumkur in a short time and started enquiring this place.
Important confusing fact is that there are two Siddara bettas .. One near dobhaspet and one near koratagere. Our destination is Siddara betta near koratagere. We need to take service road at this flyover (this place name is Dobhaspet) and take right turn to reach koratagere and then Siddara betta. We reached Siddara betta around 11 AM. We did not get food on the way. We checked for the food at the base and ordered at a small hotel to have it after coming back from trekking.
The Trek…There are steps till the temple. We started going in that route to the hill top, meanwhile we met a localite/guide he said there is another way to trek which pass thru many other places of hill. Then we hired his service (for `400/-) for our trek and started trekking with him. The trekking was thru steep hill rocks, there is no path and it is lil slippery. On the way we saw some small cave and spent some time over there. Then we started our trekking again and in middle the guide forgot the route, after searching for 5-10mins we were in the right way and joined the steps path to the temple after almost 1 hour trek.
I’m already exhausted even though we took frequent intervals, as it was taking time for me, so I asked other team members to go ahead with the trek. I took almost 15 mins rest and started trekking again. Meanwhile other team members reached temple had bath and completed puja (it’s good to carry another pair of dress). By the time I reached the temple they were in Cave exploration. I had Quick darshan and hired other guide service (for `50/-) to join the team members inside the cave. There are many guides available near the cave. It took just 5-10 mins to meet other team members in the cave. Then we all started the Cave exploration. 
The Cave ...
The cave is starts from the temple (near the Shiva linga) and ends outside the temple. The cave was long and the cave exploration was thrilling. There are some Samadhis of sadhus inside the caves who meditated here some time back.
We started to move inside caves. The passage was very small at some places; the rocks were quite slippery and sharp. At some places we need to cross big rocks... there were some real low rise rocks where we had to literally crawl to pass thru ...It was awesome !!
We also reached a few open areas with vegetation. One of these areas housed large roots which are good enough to be a nice swing. We had some group photos over there... and finally we manage to reach end of that cave after passing thru some bees :-(. It is good to carry Torchlight with you that helped us a lot in these caves.
There are many monkeys around this hill like in many other places which take away if you carry any plastic bags (i think it’s a nice way to reduce the usage of plastics :-) ).
From here we can trek to the hill top where we can see another temple and some meditation points and good 360 view of surrounding places.
But we could not go there as it was already 3pm to start the journey back to Bangalore. This time we used the steps to come back to the base unlike the trek path we used while going to the top. On the way we went to a place called Pyramid where two sadhus are still meditating. We did not disturb them and came down to the base and started our journey back to Bangalore. On the way we passed thru the Elevated expressway in Tumkur road that was newly opened on that day, which saved almost one hour of our journey.
Food – Kamath Hotel and some Dabas available on the way in Tumkur road. But no food is available at Siddara Betta. Good to carry from Bangalore.
Transportation - Self
Hey nice narration and nice place to visit for one day trip....thanks dude for finding a interesting place.
ReplyDeletethank you..
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