Memorable trip to Daroji Bear Sanctuary

As promised on my previous blog, I am writing about my photographic trip to Daroji Bear Sanctury.

We left Bangalore on 13 August in the afternoon. We thought we will reach forest guest house by 10 PM or so. We started well until Chithradurga, from there the road to Hospet was horrible. When we reached Hospet for dinner it was already 9 PM. Then we realized that the car has a flat tire. So spent another 30 min or so swapping the tire and started our final leg of our journey to Daroji.

We reached Kamalapura pretty soon. All our previous study conveyed us to take the “Canal Road” to reach the Forest Guest house. So we took the road (sort of) which was next to the Canal started driving. It was pitch dark and no cell phone reception. We should have taken another road which runs on the other side of canal bank which is the “actual Canal Road”. Some how we managed and reached a place. It was already 11 PM by then, and all we could notice was a building with Forest Department logo. We thought we reached the guest house. But to our luck, that building is in fact the Forest Office not the guest house. So we started scrambling again. Local public does not have a clue where the guest house is. Some how all of a sudden we got the cell phone reception and we could make a phone call and get the direction to reach the guest house. By the time we reached it was close to mid night.

We slept in the guest house after eating and woke up to the sound of birds chirping all around us. It was a nice morning, and the fresh air immediately rejuvenated us.   There was plenty of opportunity at the guest house for Macros. The following video had few flower photos,

Then we saw the observatory tower, so we started venturing towards the tower. The view from the tower was magnificent that completely diverted us from the fact that how unstable the tower was.  The tower had small openings otherwise completely covered. So manage to capture few photos from it with great physical difficulty.

As I had mentioned earlier about the Tyre issue, we did not wanted to take any chance. We wanted to get the tire fixed. We headed back to Kamalapura, and it took more time than what we anticipated to get it fixed. Finally we had “some food” at Mayura Yathrinivas as we were very eager to head to Bear Sanctuary.

Again we took the “canal road” which took nearly 2 hours to reach the sanctuary. We reached little late at the sanctuary and some how managed/convinced the guard to take us to the spot where we can watch the bears from a very close distant. Bears could easily smell us. We were sitting on a “sun cooked” hot boulder for nearly 3 hours and clicked plenty of photographs. There were Sloth Bears, Ruddy Mongoose, Pea Fowl, Spurfowl, Peacocks.

The following video summarizes what all we saw sitting for 3 hours.

Then we headed back to the watch tower and clicked some magnificent land scapes.

This video has landscapes shot in the morning as well as in the evening.

We also got a chance to photograph few birds.

Enjoy and please leave comments.

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~ by Nagesha Saligrama on September 19, 2009.