Our First Coorg Visit as a Family

We had gone to Coorg for 3 days in taxi. We had booked a home stay there "Blue Mountain Estate Stay". This blog is about our experiences in Coorg.

We had selected July end to travel because my iPhone 6 was showing little or no rain forecast for those three days. We sat in the taxi at 6:30 AM on July 31st and marched steadily towards our destination. On the way, some songs were being played in the taxi (Toyota Etios A/C) by the cab driver. However, we did not find most of the songs to be exciting enough. He was playing songs from his CD.

During our way, we stopped at Kamat and had good breakfast there. It was quite spicy and we ate dosa, vada, idly and sambhar. We also stopped at a Cafe Coffee Day to consider having some coffee, but decided not to have that as I had started imaging the wonderful smell of coffee from Coorg / Kushalnagar! Then, we immediately went to Elephant Dubari in Kushalnagar, although that decision proved to be wrong because we reached there at 12:45 PM, whereas it is open from 9 to 12:30 PM and then from 4:30 to 5:30 PM, with the Elephant bathing being open only from 9 to 10:30 AM.

Then, we went to Tibetian monastery where my wife did some window shopping and my daughter had a good time. We also saw the monastery which was breathtaking to watch.

Then, we reached Madikeri city and somebody familiar with the home stay showd us the way to Napoklu which is 25 kilometers from Madikeri city. The signal strength of mobile phone was very weak there. We managed to reach our homestay which was at a huge ascent and was very quiet and beautiful. We were greeted by bright sunshine as we had reached there at 3 PM, with lot of green and shiny flora surrounding us from all sides.

We relaxed for couple of hours and then met the owners of that homestay, who said they have an estate behind that homestay and 3 dogs to maintain safety in that area. Then we went to see Shiva temple and the ride was very pleasant and memorable, with paddy fields zooming into us from both the sides.

We were the only couple who had reached there on Friday. The next day, three more families or couples had come to stay for two days. One family was such that they had driven all the way from Bangalore, and they belonged to Gulf. It was nice to exchange some meaningful conversation with them.

There was another couple that was quite cheerful and gung-ho, and they visited the second highest peak of Karnataka on Sunday morning.

The third couple stayed away from us and they remained non-descript.

The dinner at that homestay was very good throughout because they used organic ingredients.

Since my daughter is fond of moon, so several hours of the evenings and nights were spent in staring at moon, and we were lucky in that regard because it used t get dark as early as 6 PM there!

We then went to Talakaveri and had a great time there. It was drizzling up there, yet we mustered our strength to climb 300+ stairs to reach the peak. There we found several foreigners and professional cameras and cameraman engulfing us. The scene was splendid because the clouds had decided to greet us and to smirk us.

When we returned to the homestay, then their owner showed me a book written during India Bhutan war, where his father had participated in that war. I was quite touched by the gesture of the owner.

The only flip side there was the small size of the room where we were staying.

We also went to their nearby house and took a look at that house. It had a large dining hall and a large attic. There was a pond of water in front of their house which was used for supplying water to their house.

On our way back, we went to Elephant Dubari and took elephant ride and did some boating. The boating was quite fun because the driver of the boat had made it a thrilling ride for us.

We also listened to some of my favorite Bollywood songs on our way back.