An Early Morning Trip to Nandi Hills, Karnataka
After relocating to Bengaluru recently, being busy with the process of settling down in the new place, I was quite tired and looking for a short weekend gateway nearby. My sister was visiting our place during Durga Puja and also wanted to visit a hill station nearby. Being someone from Bengal where the snow-capped mighty Himalayas in Darjeeling have set its own standard, hills in the southern parts of India seems quite unimpressive to me because of its smaller heights. It did not take a long time though to prove my notion wrong as we decided to visit Nandi Hills in November this year, a small and beautiful hill station just 60 km away from the Bengaluru city.
We just planned on a Friday evening to watch the next day sunrise in Nandi Hills and quickly arranged a cab and packed my camera. Next morning at 4.30 am, we started and reached there at around 5.50 am. The road that took a diversion from the National Highway 7 led to the hill top with great scenic beauty all around. It’s a favourite destination for young couples and adventure lovers as they simply take on a bike ride to the hill top.
Nandi Hills is around 4851 ft above the sea level and is very close to Bengaluru International Airport. There are numerous stories behind the name of this hill as some says the hills derived its name as Tipu Sultan during his rule, built a fort called Nandidurga here where others believe the name has come from a 1300 year old Dravidian-style Nandi temple situated on this hill or may be as others think it is because the hills look like sleeping bull (Nandi).
Sun rays were slowly making its presence visible alleviating all the darkness and that was giving us a real stress as it is yet to take 10 more minutes to reach the hill top and we did not want to miss the view of the rising sun from there. To our utter surprise we saw a big queue in front of the ticket counter at 5.40 am in the morning and got depressed as we definitely did not anticipate this rush at this early morning and we are going to miss the sunrise. Thankfully, our cab driver knew some local people there and somehow managed the tickets for us in a good time.
We reached the hill top and got out of our car to experience breathtakingly beautiful scenery in front of us. We rushed to one of the two wooden viewing points and started clicking. The whole adjacent area around the Nandi Hills were covered with white clouds making only the tips of the hills prominent as if these tips were floating in a white cloud sea…….absolutely mesmerising and stunning beauty which I could not anticipate unless I came here. I looked up in the sky to see that the clouds were speedily passing over our heads. The aura of morning sun rays was quickly turning the whole atmosphere so magical that it left all us spellbound and speechless. The hills are also a rich source of biodiversity having a rich birdlife that attracts lots of birdwatchers and bird photographers through-out the year.
We were so busy absorbing the nature’s beauty that we did not realize the clock has already ticked 9 am and with our heart and soul fully rejuvenated, we started our way back to home. There are also other places to see in Nandi Hills like Tipu’s summer palace and fort, Bhoga Nandeeshwara temple in Nandi village which we could not cover this time but hopefully will make it next time.
