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Trip to Turahalli, Chudahalli, Agara and Begur

About a couple of years back, when I had just finished the solo ring road trip, a thought came to my mind. I wanted to visit 100 unconventional places around Bangalore. I started creating a document with places around Bangalore, which soon became a list of places in Karnataka.

The recent trips are all from the list and this trip was one of them.

We had studied the routes and estimated the time and once again, we finished the trip according to the plan. We used Google Maps and Wikimapia to find the exact locations of these places and a few online blogs to learn what is worth visiting.

The idea was to cover these places in one circle – start from Indiranagar, go to Kanakapura road, visit the places around Kanakapura road, and then use the Kaglipura junction to reach Bannerghatta road and then onto Begur and back. The round trip would be close to 90km. We started from Indiranagar at around 6am and reached Turahalli around 7am just in time for sunrise. The hill over here is a very short climb and you can see quite a few people visiting this place for their morning walk, exercise etc.




The place is filled with varieties of birds. The hills are famous for rock-climbing and you will see that quite a few of these have been named and the difficulties of climbing them have been identified.

On the top, you see a small Shani temple. The temple was closed when we visited.

After satisfying ourselves with a 100 snaps, we headed to Agara village. You need to take a diversion from Kanakapura road towards Agara village; very close to the NICE road. The diversion is close to Tataguni bus stop. This place has a small tank (Agara kere or Agara lake). The route to Agara is pretty good and is a good place to escape the city life.

From here, we headed to Chudahalli reservoir. Agara and Chudahalli are very close to each other. This place has quite a few water birds and butterflies so is an ideal spot to use your telephotos. Supposedly, this place is even better in the rainy season.




We then took an internal road to reach Kaggalipura and then headed to Bannerghatta. This stretch has bad roads and for quite some distance you won’t see a soul. There are a few lakes on the way (including TK Falls or Thottikallu falls). We had earlier planned to visit this place too, but the locals told us that the place had almost dried up and it is not worth visiting. Considering that it was noon and the sun was sharp, and we had to walk a km to reach the place, we decided not to visit.

We then headed to Begur. Begur is famous for the Pancha Lingeshwara Temple which is said to be about 1300 years old. Begur was supposedly prominent during the Chola era. It is easy to reach this place via Hosur road and is the suggested route if you are visiting from the city. However, since we were coming from Bannerghatta, we took the route via Hulimavu.

The place is undergoing renovation. They plan to clean up the walls and the inscriptions and build the dwaras (doors).

We took the Hosur road to enter the city and were back by evening.