Uttara Kannda Dist........

A trip to Karwar (Uttara Kannda district) would not have happened but for Manju – my cousin who is in the Police dept there. He persuaded me to visit the place, my parents visited him recently and their experience too counted.

Karwar and Bangalore are directly connected only by Road, the Rail and Air links are circuitous. We reached karwar in the morning by bus and were picked up from the station and dropped to the Police guest house for freshening up. The Breakfast at home was very simple and delicious. We started the day by visiting the War ship museum, as the place was without electricity on that day, we could not watch the intro video, we still managed to go around the ship and guess what we had an exclusive experience, there were no other tourists. We then went the aquarium, sad place in a dilapidated building. Waste of time. We then went to the science museum, interesting place – esp if you are with school going kids – again we were the only ones in here and had good fun.

Manju joined us at the Science museum and from here we drove up the Sadashivgad – a old fort with loads of history around it. The uphill drive was on kaccha road and the view from there was breathtaking, you could see the Kali River, the Karwar beach, the Devbagh beach, the western ghats. Am sure the Sun set view from here will be superb. We descended back to Karwar for Lunch and enjoyed some very local food. Early evening we went to the Devbagh beach on motor boats crossing underneath the huge bridge – the golden gate of Karwar. :-)

Devbagh is part of the jungle lodge properties, hammocks thrown in every possible tree pairs, some rope walking, mini play garden, the dining gol-ghars, cottages amongst trees and all this just on a private beach. The beach was hardly crowded and the view of the 3 mountains in the sea was awesome, they said you would walk up to the first one during low tides. The first one looked like a tortoise from the beach and was aptly called Kurumgad Island, the next one apparently resembled a sitting elephant and the third one had a light house. The view was out of the world and so was the experience of a clean neat private beach in India. Hawaii would easily qualify for second place without its Corals.

The second day was action packed too – we were lucky to get one of our friends lend his car to us, we drove 12 kms into Goa to top up the tank and visited the southernmost beach of Goa. This beach is not motor able, we had to trek for a quarter km before we hit the waters. This beach was a bit rough and had some rocks sitting pretty on the shore. We did get venture out to knee deep levels and it was good fun. We had a nice view of the Kurumgad Island from northern side from here. We spend more time on the beach than we had planned and returned back to Karnataka, to continue our journey into the western Ghats. Our next stop was Dandeli – a Bamboo town 120 kms away on the ghats. The road trip was to cut through dense forests and there were quite a few waterfalls on the way, frequently we would also get the view of the plains below and every time we drove up, the view got more scenic. We also saw the Kadra dam from a distance before halting at Ulavi temple. We missed the free lunch by ten minutes and ended up eating a lots of biscuits with some chai from the tea stall nearby. The place had many pilgrims from surrounding areas and it was nice to see some civilization after a 3 hour drive - a very lonely drive thru the jungles. We could not spot many animals spare some peacocks.

After the temple we headed straight to Supa dam, where our night stay was arranged by the top cop cousin. The IB was on top of hill and made for a nice view and cool weather – almost like Ooty. Roshini, Sridevi and Uncle were with us since morning and am sure were not bored yet with us. We kept them good company with some old Hindi songs.

Day three was another interesting day. We drove thro the forest again in the eastern direction to reach Sykes Point. The highest point in the district and a very beautiful hydro electricity project without disturbing nature. This was high light of the trip, a very beautiful place, we could see the River Kali flowing curvaceous between the mountains below us. A very beautiful sight – the Kodak moment of the trip. The beauty about this is that it is completely natural, there is no commercialization around this place, the nearest place for a cup of tea is 6 kms away. Tucked far from the hustle and bustle, this must be heaven on earth. I sure felt might lucky to be here.

Half hearted departure from Sykes point, we moved towards Yellapur town. Lunch in the small town and we resumed our journey to Magod falls. This is another wonderful place, with a beautiful view of the double water fall in which the second fall makes a inverted Y, another awesome place the UK dist. We were running short of time and wanted to reach Uncahlli falls which was almost 80kms from Magod falls. The roads were good, less traffic and with the need it gave an opportunity for Michael Schumacher to take over the wheel. I drove like a man possessed and did the first 40kms in under 40 minutes. We reached Sirsi and when enquired for directions the locals told us that it might not be a wise thing to try Unchalli as the roads were not great and there was small trek to reach the view point. It was almost 6pm and getting darker. We then decided to reserve Unchalli for our next trip and decided to venture into Sirsi town, We did visit the Maarikamba Temple in the heart of the town before retiring to our hotel.

Our hosts had a great time today with my one-liners and well timed jokes, we kept them entertained and learned a great deal about each other. Am sure Uncle will not easily forget the “Sirsi getting dark soon complaint joke” or the baby cheta tea shop humor and many more such instances.

Our bus from Karwar was instructed to pick us from Sirsi, which it did and we did reach back to earth (read Bangalore) from paradise. UK dist is indeed very beautiful and we did not even explore 10% of it. There are loads left – the Gokarn beach, Unchalli falls, Jog falls, the resorts for water sports. We will get back soon. Really soon. Stay Tuned.