Saturday, July 9, 2011

Yana and Betthageri Beach

During Ugadi festival time, we had been to native and decided to go for a day's trip. My brother wanted to go to a beach. Only me and my wife had seen Yana and no one else had. So we planned to visit Yana and go to Kumta for lunch and then head to Betthageri beach for sunset and return home.

It was a Sunday, 3rd April, and we were on our way to Yana. Yana is a village in Uttara Kannada district amid Sahyadri hills (Western Ghats) range with presence of huge unusual rocks. These rocks are formed of crystalline limestone. There is a popular saying in Kannada "Sokkidre Yana Rokkidre Gokarna", meaning, one needs quite a bit stamina to trek to Yana and needs quite a bit money to reach Gokarna, since, for outsiders, Gokarna would be expensive enough. But today, this saying is not applicable for both of the places! After Kannada movie "Nammoora Mandara Hoove" (1997), Yana became more famous and now there is a tar road, going very near to Yana and the trekking distance is reduced to only half a km.


We reached Yana via Sirsi, and taking Kumta road, soon followed by taking a deviation to the right. The distance from Sirsi is around 40km. We first visited the temple, a Shiva temple. For "Pradakshine", one needs to go inside the gigantic rock. The path inside resembles cave and there are a couple of small rocks hanging in the narrow space in between the rock. We had tender coconut, banana before resuming journey to next destination.


There are two roads from Yana to Kumta, our destination. One route is via Mabage village and waterfall, called Vibhooti falls. I had been to there and have had a blog posted about it. Click here to read. The other route is taking the route towards Sirsi and take a deviation to Manjuguni after about 20km, which would join to Sirsi-Kumta road. We took the former route as it was nearer, 48 km. One can find many pages in internet about the distance from Yana to Kumta mentioned as approximately 25 km. But this is wrong and via the shortest route, Kumta is at a distance of 48 km from Yana. However, from Yana till Mabage the road is very bad with jelly (crusher stones) and to travel 7 km on empty road, we took more than half an hour! We had some food, packed from home, and went to Kumta. After a pit stop for coffee/snacks, we head towards Honnavar and took a right for Betthageri beach, roughly 10 km from Kumta on NH17.

Betthageri beach is very clean, as it is still remote. When we went there, there was nobody else, though some people came after us from neighboring villages after sometime. We played for an hour in the beach and just when the Sun started to set, it became cloudy and though we got nice views, we didn't get nice sunset!
 



We returned to home from there via Honnavar and Gerusoppa. It was a wonderful trip with full family after a long time.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

superrooooooooooooooo gow

Gowtham said...

Thanks :-)

Kusum said...

Yana is a nice place. A decade ago it didn't have so much popularity. I had been there then ... I hiked the long way on the phantom trail well infested with ugly-bloodsucking-leeches. Saw few snakes on the way too. But, then again I went there again after 5 years later and was amazed to see the road.

Nice post and good pictures :) I see the wonderful Jog Falls on the header :)

Gowtham said...

Kusum, Thanks. Leeches you can see even now if you go during rainy season.
I love Jogfalls.

Saru Singhal said...

Looks like a great place to unwind in the lap of nature. Thanks for sharing your memories with us...