Spontaneous Serendipity

This Satruday morning, we went on a short Road Trip to Hassan. Plan was to cover 3 important historic tourist attraction of Karnataka >> Shravanabelagola, Belur and Halebid.

We started at around 1PM on Saturday, reached Shravanabelagola at 4:30PM. The shrine is on top of a monolithic stone mountain. The Climb of 400 odd steps to reach the top was not so easy with Neiv jumping all over the place. But it was worth the effort with the peace that you get when you sit in front of supposedly “the largest monolithic statue in the world” of lord Mahaaveer. If nothing else, Neiv had a good time running around in the open space in front of the idol.

From Shravanabelagola we went straight to Hassan town for a night halt. The hotel that we took was pretty decent and not too expensive. Next morning we started to Belur, via the impeccable SH57, halting for few minutes to take some snaps in sunflower farms.

The Chennakesava Temple at Belur is definitely one of the rare and not to be missed place if you visit south India. You can get more details about it on wiki. From Belur we went to Halebidu, which is famour for Hoysaleswara Temple. Though it is more famous than Belur, it did not live up to my expectation, which were already set too high at Belur. But I should mention that the place is very well kept and the district admin is taking pains to make it a popular place.

We started back to Bangalore at around 4PM, beating evening traffic, we reached home at around 9PM.

How to Reach Shravanabelagola: Take NH4 Road towards Tumkur, go straight for 40Kms. Take left onto NH48 at Nelamangala, go straight for 100kms. Take left onto a village road towards Shravanabelagola, go straight for around 15 kms (all approx distances.)

How To reach Belur: Take NH4 Road towards Tumkur, go straight for 40Kms. Take left onto NH48 at Nelamangala, go straight for 150kms to reach Hassan. Take right to enter the town. Across the town, take right onto SH57. Reach Belur after 32kms. Take deep left turn to arrive at the temple.

How To reach Halebid: You can either divert for 20 kms to right on SH57 before reaching Belur or could choose to go directly from Belur.

Road Condition:
- NH4: Good, 4 lane, pothole free but usually congested.
- NH48: Good, 2 lane, Pothole free with moderate traffic.
- SH57: Excellent, 2 lane, Pothole Free with rare traffic.

Click here to checkout the photos of Hassan Trip.