My Photos

This beautiful place is about 120 kms from Bangalore, towards Mysore. You have to take a left at a signal just before Maddooru. Our great department has not even bothered to bring it to the attention of tourists to let them know the directions to this wonderful place.

You can only ask people around there for directions and get into a rough mud road drive for about 10 kms from the Bangalore-Mysore highway. Ask for the distance and they all tell you which seem to be a walking distance! But no way.

Its quite a long way inside. You arrive at the dam (Naetraavati River) just before you almost think you have driven too far.

The first part of this drive has a huge lake on the left, supported by a high raised artificially secured dam. There is nothing much to see inside but the scent and warmth of village starts here. The kids and olds look at your car with awe...like we perhaps did when the British arrived! No not really to that extent, but they sure get curious when you drive in. You sense the road has never been cared for. When we drove, villagers let their Raagi harvest dry out on the road... they love us driving over the spread hay. It helps them later to beat off raagi seeds easily I suppose.

Once you reach the Naetraavati river dam, there are couple of villagers involved in their own daily life. We found them this time scraping up sand from underwaters onto their iron circular boats called "Theppa" and sell them to the lorry loads.

You can get into these theppas and have them take you over the river to wherever you love to go. We were told the time of the year (December) was not right to watch birds as they start coming only during end of Feb and beginning of March. But you wont have much water in the river then.

Serene village but for the lorry motoring. There is nothing else you can see around the village. If you go in Feb/March you get to see thousands of varieties of birds! we were told. So I am going to be ready for that again. Join us there ;)