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Kolar Trip – Visiting ancient temples and Antharagange trek

Here goes my 2^nd blog, after good feedback I received from my Friends and all the new folks who connected with me after reading my blog. Happy to hear that my blog is really helping people in visiting spots those are not very crowded like Nandi Hills these days; as all Bangalore traffic is getting diverted there these days!!

So here I write about another day trip to Kolar district from Bangalore! As my better half has a strong love towards History and he loves those trips when we come across ancient architectures and can walk back in lanes of History, we choose to travel to Kolar this time. Kolar is famous for its forts and temples.

This was our first trip or technically you can say last trip for Year 2020 as we all were mostly inside homes or just stepping for some fresh air and short walks/drive. As I mentioned in my previous blog, we are only taking day trips and avoiding eating out and interaction this time again we packed everything in our little car and started our trip sometime around 10 am.

Our first destination was Someshwara Temple, in Fort Area. You can pin this exact location on google maps and just follow the same. The roads towards Kolar district run very smooth and you can just enjoy the whole ride with no trouble or worries. This place was exactly 69 kms for us and it just took us 1.5 hours to reach our destination. As we were travelling with kids, we just stop by in middle for around 15 minutes for a short mid-morning snack/fruit break. We munched some bananas and apples and head back on our route post that.

The history about Somehswara Temple is that it was built by the Chola dynasty who ruled in 11^th century and were dethroned by Chalukyas. There was some renovation going for few parts of the temple, but that was not at all a worry point. Make sure that temples do close sometime in afternoon, so do check the map instructions on closing timings.

The temple has a good enough parking place where you can comfortably park your vehicle and take a nice walk inside the temple.

Then we moved to Kolaramma Temple, which stands just beside the Someshwara Temple. You can plan to have your car parked just right there and just walk at the entrance from backside. Again, google maps, walking mode can clearly instruct you on the same and you need not check with anyone around for any pointers.

Kolaramma Temple is built in Dravida Vimana style which dates to the Ganga period. The temple has two shrines one for Durga, who is known as Kolaramma and another for Saptamatrikas. We had some trouble in finding the temple entrance, so we had to rush our walk across this temple as kids were getting very hungry.

You can actually find a very good community park just across the temple road, which is well facilitated and can be used for a small picnic if COVID is gone, but for now we didn’t choose that as our picnic spot. We drove back and found a shady place in some farm and had our picnic there.

Kids enjoyed running around in fields and we did click some beautiful pictures with nature. We had our lunch and lemonade and relaxed for a while and breathed some clean fresh air.

Then we headed towards the Antharagange, which was our next spot on the list. This is just going to be 3 kms from here and a good place to trek. Antharagange, is a sacred stream that pours sweet water from the mouth of a bull. The spot is so scenic that you will fall in love with the view the moment you reach here and would be a great motivation to climb upstairs. The trek here isn’t difficult at all and you can take breaks in between if you want. The hilltop resembles a snake hood, which gives a bird’s eye view of seven towns. The Neelakanteshwara temple, at foothills is an attraction.

There are few spots where you will see lots of stone kept on-top of each other, which could be some belief, though I am not very sure of that, but this definitely makes the spot a beauty and very picturesque.

This was out last spot for the trip, post that we munched some vada-pav prepared from home and chilli-garlic balls and head back home. We started back to our home around 5 pm and reached home by 7:30 pm this time. We reached home safe and content.

We feel gifted that still in Bangalore we have places we can go with family and breath some pure air and luckily the day we picked for our trip was blessed with cloudy weather which brought more beauty and relaxation in the whole plan!!

Go ahead and step-out!! The world around is so beautiful!!