re: The art of travelling between Bangalore - Mangalore/Udupi Did a small trip to Hariharapura (near Sringeri) last friday. These are the updates on the road conditions.
Starting from Hassan, I took the following route for the forward journey Hassan-Belur-Chikmagalur-Aldur-Balehonnur-Jayapura-Koppa-Hariharapura
Hariharapura is situated between Koppa (10 kms) and Sringeri (20 kms) Hassan-Belur: is still in very good condition Belur-Chikmagalur: Getting worse by the day. They have filled up the broken stretches/potholes with mud, but given the rain, they have been washed out or have become slush pits. It still has a couple of good stretches though. Chikmagalur-Vastare-Aldur: Decent surface with potholes here and there till Vastare. After Vastare, the road has gone to the dogs. Pathetic stretch of road. Aldur-Balehonnur-Jayapura: Alternates between good and bad stretches. Road is broken at most curves. Jayapura-Koppa-Hariharapura: Good surface with very little potholes. But the road has lot of undulations till Koppa. After Koppa, it is very good with almost no potholes and broken stretches till Hariharapura (and the same continues till Sringeri)
We also went to Sringeri and Kigga from Hariharapura and the road is just lovely all the way to Sringeri and till the Kigga turn-off. Kigga is around 7-8 kms from Sringeri towards SK Border-Karkala. This is the NH 13.
For the return journey we took the following route Hariharapura-Koppa-Jayapura-Balehonnur-Aldur-Haandi-Baskal-Gendehalli-Belur-Hassan
Till Aldur, the road conditions are mentioned above. At Aldur, we decided to take a new route after taking advice from a local friend.
The friend told me that Aldur-Haandi route was newly laid and suggested I take it to reach Chikmagalur via Haandi-Vastare instead of Aldur-Vastare-Chikmagalur.
Coming to the road conditions. Aldur-Haandi: Lovely road. Newly laid and barring a couple of small humps, is awesome to drive. We join the Chikmagalur-Mudigere road at Haandi. Took a left towards Chikmagalur and after a km or so, we took a right towards Baskal. Haandi-Baskal: Initially the road was a good single road. But a 2-3 kms after the main road, the potholes began to surface. The next 5 kms to Baskal was pretty bad. The road is broken in lots of places. I did scrape the bottom of the i20 one time. If you have good ground clearance in your car, you can manage it easily. Baskal-Gendehalli-Belur: Single road with a mixture of good and bad stretches.
This route is 10 kms lesser than the route I took for the onward journey and is faster. But, vehicles having low GC could find it tough.
We were in three cars (an i20, a swift and a Vento). The Swift and the Vento were ahead of me and had already passed Aldur before I reached there. They had taken the regular Aldur-Vastare-Chikmagalur road to reach Belur. Me, in the i20 managed to reach Belur when they had just left Chikmagalur. It was raining heavily on both the routes.
Last edited by addyhemmige : 7th November 2011 at 13:16.
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