Blogs from Coorg, Karnataka, India, Asia - page 2

Coorg is an awesome place to stay and enjoy the climate. We stayed in a resort which was beyond our expectations. We started from Coimbatore @ 8 AM in the morning and reached Coorg in the evening. Stayed there for 3 days and the experience was awesome. The place is also called Medikeri. Nearby airport is Mysore. We visited the Golden temple and artificial park.... read more

I ended up going to Coorg twice in under 5 weeks; once with my parents visiting from the UK and the second time on a school trip with around 25 M1s (11-12 year olds)..so I’ll cover both trips! Coorg is around 6 hours’ drive from my current home in Bangalore. Through a travel agent I used for Sri Lanka, I booked a small Tata taxi and luckily my parents, our luggage and I managed to all fit in. I’d looked in my Lonely Planet previously and booked us to stay 3 nights, 4 days at Golden Mist Plantations in Coorg, a Dutch-owned plantation. The road to Coorg wasn’t bad until we got to Madikeri area; up til then the road was pretty smooth with lots of Café Coffee Days dotted along the road every few miles, ... read more

After a brief lunch in Virajpet, and eating at a very local place for pittance, Ronny tried to bargain for a cab to the next junction as the next bus was a 3 hour wait, the problem was there was only 1 cabbie and he was not moving from his spot, unless he got the price he wanted. 5 mins later we were all in his cab! Reached our destination at a little junction which had 3 shops/ houses, called up the homestay(Honey Valley) and he came to collect us, for the 20min (3km) uphill ride on some very rocky road(if you can call it that). Reached our destination which was this homestay which contained no more than 20 rooms spread over 3 buildings, and then we were surrounded by hills, mountains, trees, and clean smelling ... read more

The last stop of the journey was Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement “camp” consisting of several villages and a monastery with at least 5,000 monks. This is the largest Tibetan settlement (total population 15,000) outside the homeland, settled since the late 1960s. India gave the land to the Tibetans; if you want to stay the night, you have to get documentary permission from the Tibetan Government in Exile. We just went for a couple of hours to see the amazing temples, shop around a bit, and eat (of course). It was a bit of a random immersion experience, between the Chinese food, Chinese trinkets for sale, young monks playing hackey-sack, singing or music or chanting practice, some western dread-locked hippies hanging around in seeming-meditation, and the ubiquitous Indian auto-rickshaw drivers calling "Rickshaw, Madam?" At what appeared to ... read more

After our leisurely-paced hike, while enjoying a delicious family-style lunch, Prakash (owner of Palace Estates) told us there was a local celebration for the rice harvest, which is accompanied by traditional drumming and dancing. He arranged a jeep to pick us up and take us to the site of the dancing. So off we went for another junge-ly bumpy jostling jeep ride, following Prakesh and his family in their car. It took a little while to find the location of the dancing — occasionally stopping the vehicles and listening for the drum sound, driving a little closer, listening, driving, until we found the site, a shady spot alongside some rice paddies. Turns out it was more like a rehearsal or practice than an actual dance performance coming up after we leave, Prakash explained apologetically (needlessly, since ... read more