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Karnataka trip 6 - Dharmasthala & Subramanya

 Our final day of sight seeing in this trip was to cover the spiritual places of Dharmasthala & Kukke Subramanya.





From our home stay, Dharmasthala is 80 kms away and we were expected to drive for around 2 hours. We were told that the drive would be through ghat area, With this information we set out through the Sakleshpur route. After Sakleshpur, starts the highway which has been caved through ghat and forest, navigating through numerous curves along. Few minutes into the highway only we realized what we had signed up for. The ghat road was traversed by numerous truck, each following its own speed limit, every 100 metres had a curve and on top of it the roas was  also undergoing maintenance at places. It was one odd experience driving through this road, something that we have never come across in our travel these years. The last leg of the drive is shifting from highway to forest area. All vehicles in the path are designed to Dharmasthala temple only. Wondering how one got the temple built inside the forest.




Dharmasthala seem to be like the Thirumala. Once we reached there, we could that apart from the temple complex, there are directions towards free meals, river Nethravathi, museum, stay/accommodations, etc. One would need to stay there for a day or so to go through Dharmasthala fully. Famous for its free meals, we could see groceries being transported, stocked and prepared through the temple complex. Dedicated to Lord Manjunath, the temple is set up in Kerala style architecture, you could not see Gopurams like in other south Indian temples. The free darshan queue was standing for more than 3 hours. So we took the Rs.200 ticket for special darshan, that also took around 1 hour for us to get the darshan of  Lord Manjunath. Men had to remove their shirts at the shrine entrance. The temple complex houses - God Manjunath, Goddess Ammanavaru, Lord Ganesha. We had the darshan of all of them in golden kaappu. Boards inside the temple have been written in Tamil also.  As we came out of the shrine after the darshan, we were given temple prasadam. We wanted to go for the temple meals, but were running short of time so headed straight to the parking lot and started the journey towards Kukke Subramanya temple.





Dharmasthala to Kukke Subramanya is an hour journey. We headed back to the highway, traversing back in the same route and from there drove towards  Kukke Subramanya. This temple again is inside the forest, some 10-12 kms from the highway. We reached there around 3 PM. We first encounter the Kumaradara river, which that day was flooded by devotees. The road over the river takes us to the temple. We could see numerous lodges as we go towards the temple. We parked in the temple lot and had got refreshed quickly at the public washroom before walking to the temple. This temple was also over crowded so we opted for the Rs.100 special darshan. The main deity, Lord Subramanya is in the form of serpant. It is believed here that, Indra who resided here got his daughter Devanai married to Lord Subranmaya. Within half an hour we had the darshan here. The temple entrance has a huge gopuram and we also saw temple cars right out the gopuram. We were given laddus as prasadam for the Rs.100 tickets. Once we came out of the temple, we went to the Mysore cafe near the temple and had food as we had skipped lunch.





We then started our journey to home stay, We had to again navigate via the ghat road to Sakleshpur town. After reaching here unfortunately we lost our data connection/mobile network and found it very difficult to reach our home stay, that's 1.5 away from Sakleshpur. One kind soul on the way helped us by calling Sunil's number from his mobile and showed the correct route. On reaching the home stay, we completed the billing/payment and got ready to go home the next day. Starting at 7 AM in the morning, we reached Chennai by 5:30 PM through the Hassan, Nice road route.

Until the next trip..

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Location: Belur, Karnataka, India

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