Having covered October visits to Bangalore, Mount Abu, and Udaipur in earlier posts, I will step back to an earlier trip and a visit to the Golden Temple in Bylakuppe, Karnataka in March 2017.

The Golden Temple, also known as Namdroling Monastery, is a Buddhist monastery located in western Karnataka about 153 mile (247) kilometers from Bangalore. Established in 1963, it is one of the largest teaching centers of Tibetan Buddhism in the world (per Wikipedia). It is an impressive and beautiful facility.

We visited in the morning on our drive back from a work event at Club Mahindra Virajpet Coorg. After parking, we walked past the living facilities into the temple / monastery area. The first notable building we saw was the Zangdog Palri Temple, which is quite an impressive facility. We were unable to go inside.

Zangdog Palri Temple seen from the entrance path

It is impressive from the back as well as the front.

A view of the back of the Zangdog Palri Temple

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A couple of months back, I wrote about a trip to Mount Abu. This post takes up the story the next day, when we drove to Udaipur, a city in southern Rajasthan, to catch our flight to Mumbai. This is a shorter drive (three hours rather than five hours) than a return trip to Ahmadabad and, as a bonus, we got to see more sights.

We left at a comfortable time in the morning. At the 3,900 feet / 1,200 meter altitude of Mount Abu, the weather was clear and pleasant. We set off in a caravan of cars and headed towards Udaipur. Udaipur is known as the “City of Lakes” and is a very popular tourist destination. There are many palaces in the city and on the lakes. The palaces are considered of the Rajput era and were built from the 16th to 19th century.

Our first, and only palace visit, was to the see the Monsoon Palace on the western outskirts of Udaipur. Built in 1884, the palace is high on the Aravalli Hills, just outside Udaipur. According to Wikipedia, it was planned to be a large astronomical observatory, but upon the premature death of the builder, Maharana Sajjan Singh, it was turned into a hunting lodge and a place to observe the monsoon clouds. It has a fantastic view of Udaipur, its lakes, and the palaces. This first picture is of Lake Pichola taken from the Monsoon Palace.

Lake Pichola in Udaipur from the Monsoon Palace

This next picture is the only one that includes any part of the Monsoon Palace. It is a rather plain palace and most of the pictures I took there were of our traveling group. As a policy, I don’t include people pictures in these public blog posts. Here you can see the wall of the palace with Udaipur and its lakes in the distance.

The walls of the Monsoon Palace with Udaipur in the distance

This is a view of another major lake in Udaipur, Fateh Sagar Lake. It has a park and a solar observatory on islands in the lake.

Fateh Sagar Lake from the Monsoon Palace

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On a trip to India last October, our week finished in Ahmedabad, a city in the state of Gujarat. The team planned an excellent team-building event, a trip to the hill station of Mount Abu in Rajasthan.

Before I go into the narrative of the trip, here is a teaser picture to get you interested enough to read and look further. This is a view from Guru Shikhar, the highest point (5,650 ft / 1,722 m) in the Arbuda Mountains where Mount Abu lies.

Looking south from Guru Shikhar, the Mount Abu town is in the distance on the right.

We left after our morning meetings on Friday, setting off on the highway heading northwest from the offices in Gandhinagar. The roads were generally good, but also filled with commercial as well as personal traffic. The drive was about 5 hours.

Trucks on the way from Gujarat to Rajasthan

Large trucks were not the only commercial traffic on the road. We came upon some cattle being herded in this rich agricultural region.

Cattle being herded down the road on the way to Rajasthan

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On our first day in Bangalore in October 2017, we had a chance to go out into the city to see some of the sights. Our flight from Hong Kong was delayed so we did not start at the crack of dawn as planned, but rather at about 10am. The early start had been planned because Bangalore is notorious for its bad traffic. Believe me, it can be really bad. The calendar was on our side as this was Sunday on the tree day weekend of Mahatma Gandhi Day which is celebrated as an Indian national holiday every October 2nd. It being a holiday weekend, traffic was quite light.

We headed off from our hotel, the Park Plaza Bangalore, going to Bangalore Palace and picking up our guide on the way. The palace was built in the 1870s in a tudor style by Maharaja Chamarajendra Wadiyar X, the king of Mysore. It is still being used by the current king of Mysore for his ceremonial duties.

You can get recorded audio tours that describe the features of the palace and its history. One note on the tour — you have to pay extra to be able to take pictures.

An outside view of Bangalore Palace.

There are hunting trophies throughout the palace including this elephant head at the top of the entrance stairs.

This elephant head overlooks the main entrance to the Bangalore Palace

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This is the second post (the first is here) on our trip to Lonavla and documents our trek to Tung Fort. Tung Fort was built before 1600 by the Adil Shahi dynasty and was captured by Chatrapati Shivaji in the 1670s as he built the Maratha Kingdom. It is s small fort, holding no more than 200 soldiers and served mainly as a lookout. The nearby forts of Lohagad and Visapur could be signaled from Tung, with Tung having a great view of the countryside. (I took a trek to Lohagad Fort back in 2013.)

Tung Fort is about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Lonavla, and is on the Western Ghats, where the higher Deccan Plateau gives way to the coastal plain also known as the Konkan. The erosion of the basalt leads to beautiful flat-topped peaks that overlook valleys below. My teaser image to keep you reading the whole post is a panorama looking east across the fort, with the relatively small area of the fort visible. The knob just to the right of the fort is Tikona Fort.

The top of Tung Fort looking from the west end to the east

Now to return to the trip narrative. We left off in the last post at Della Resort, watching the Sun set. The next day started clear and beautiful. I was greeted by Della’s statuary.

Good morning from the statuary at Della Resort

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On my visit to India in March, 2017, I had the opportunity to stay overnight in Lonavla, a town just more than half way to Pune from Mumbai on the Mumbai / Pune Expressway. First a note on spelling and pronunciation. On many maps, including Google Maps, Lonavla shows as Lonavala. In other places, notably Wikipedia, looking for Lonavala immediately redirects you to the page for Lonavla. This had always confused me. This confusion was solved on this trip when I noticed that the Roman character rendering of the town name included both Lonavala and Lonavla. They are both correct and reflect a nuance in the pronunciation (at least as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia article). The town name is pronounced with a slight pause between the V and the second L, hence the longer phonetic spelling of Lonavala. I will use Lonavla in this post, the first of two posts on the weekend trip to Lonavla and Tung Fort.

Lonavla is on the edge of the Western Ghats, where the higher Deccan Plateau gives way to the coastal plain also known as the Konkan. In my post from a few months back on a trip to Bhandardara, there was a location called KonkanKada, which is an overlook to the Konkan. Lonavla is another such place. Being on the road between Mumbai and Pune, it is a quick drive for a pleasant weekend out of the city. There are many natural and historic sites to visit in the area.

Here is a two teaser image to get you to continue through the whole post, a sunset from Della Resort in Lonavla.

The Sun sets behind a fountain

We headed off from the TCS offices in Powai, in the Hiranandani Gardens development. The fancy tops of the buildings are an Hiranandani trademark style.

Our usual starting point, Powai

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This is the second of two posts describing a lovely weekend in the hill country of Maharashtra outside of Mumbai. The first post covered our trip from Mumbai to Bhandardara, a small resort village about 115 miles north-east of Mumbai. After a nice trip to Rhanda Falls and a good meal and conversation, we awoke the next day to a beautiful morning.

Bur first, the teaser photo of one of the places we visited later that day. This is looking southwest from Lake Ghatghar from the KokanKada¹ overlook. There is a lake behind us that is used to create electricity as the water flows to the lake seen in the picture. Apparently, this water is pumped back up during electricity surpluses so it can be re-used to supply peak demand. In any case, the view is wonderful.

This is the view looking southwest from near Lake Ghatghar

But the day started at the Andavan Resort in Bhandardara, with the morning Sun shining in the window.

A pretty view out the window of my bungalow

We had a nice breakfast and a great view of Lake Arthur.

A view from the resort of Lake Arthur

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During my trip to India in October, 2016, I had the opportunity to spend the weekend in Bhandardara, a small resort village about 115 miles north-east of Mumbai. This post documents the first day of the trip, to Bhandardara and Rhanda Falls. There will be another post that chronicles our second day.

We left early Saturday from Powai, next to the office in Hiranandani Gardens. Hiranandani is a major developer in India, who has a distinct architectural style that includes fancy tops to the buildings in his developments.

Powai Hiranandani towers at our starting point

We were headed to a much more rural location. The monsoon had ended just a few weeks before our trip, so everything was green and lush. I’ll step outside the narrative to show a view from the Andavan Resort in Bhandardara. A very pretty location.

A view of Lake Arthur from the resort

There was a bit of driving involved. It took us about four and half hours to get to Bhandardara, with a stop for refreshments at the Manas resort, which is located on the highway to Nasik, just as you reach the plateau above Mumbai. The view below is on the highway just north of Thane.

Heading on toward Nasik

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Last October, I had the opportunity to visit a famous Jain temple in Karnataka state in India. The temple is in the town of Shravanabelagola, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from where I was staying in Bangalore. Heading off at 7am on a Sunday, it was a pleasant three-hour drive to reach Shravanabelagola. There are two hills in Shravanabelagola, Chandragiri Hill and Vindhyagiri Hill. We were there to see the great statue of Bahubali also called Gommateshwara.

This is a very impressive statue. From Wikipedia:

Bahubali is also called Gommateshwara because of the Gommateshwara statue dedicated to him. The statue was built by the Ganga dynasty minister and commander Chavundaraya; it is a 57-foot (17 m) monolith (statue carved from a single piece of rock) situated above a hill in Shravanabelagola in the Hassan district, Karnataka state, India. It was built in around 981 A.D. and is one of the largest free-standing statues in the world.

The monolthic statue of Gommateshwara

One has to go up a long staircase, at least a half mile, to get up to the temple where the statue is located.

The bottom of the long entryway to the temple

The steps up Vindhyagiri Hill

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Back in October 2015, I had the opportunity to visit Bhubaneswar, India for business. After our work day, we had the opportunity to visit the Udayagiri Jain Caves. Located on the northwest side of town, these caves were carved into the sandstone hill starting in the first century B.C. as dwelling retreats for devotees of the Jain religion.

Jains practice extreme asceticism so the dwellings are sparse on the interior. Not so the exterior which has many detailed carvings and reliefs. Rani Gumpha or the Queen’s Cave is perhaps the most impressive.

Rani Gumpha or Queen’s Cave, cave #1 at Udayagiri caves

There is a delightful carving of a tiger known as Bagh Gumpha. Yes, the “Tiger Cave.”

Bagh Gumpha or Tiger cave

Udayagiri is part of a larger complex of caves and temples that includes caves and temples on Khandagiri hill. This is a view looking across to Khandagiri temple.

The Sun setting behind Khandagiri temple

Small Elephant Cave has beautiful carved elephants.

Chota Hathi Gumpha or Small Elephant Cave

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