Coastal Karnataka - Part 2

Day 3 : Murudeswar - Idugunji - Gokarna - Murudeswar

Day 3: I was eager to get a view of the sunrise and woke up by 6 am. Surprisingly the beach already had students/tourist taking bath and i could hear them from my room's balcony. With father and son fast asleep I sat by myself for about an hour looking at the sky going all black to shades of violet & pink and finally to bright day light. It was one of the most memorable times of the trip.

Later we went to the Booloka kailasha on top of the small hillock and enjoyed the show on the story of Ravana getting athma linga and the significance of Gokarana and Murudeshwra temples. It was very well presented and I felt the Rs.10 per head was a very reasonable ticket for such a nice show.
By afternoon we left towards Gokarna. On our way we stopped at Idugunji ganesha. We missed Batkal beach as we didn't know about it. My uncle says it is an excellent beach on the way to Gokarna and a must see.

But we stopped at Ramatheerta near honnavar. (missed clicking some snaps). It is a small temple, not many know about this place. A shiva temple that was worshiped by lord rama is present here. The story here is, as Rama was going through the forests in this area during his vanavasa there was no water and he shot an arrow in the land and it became a source of a fountain / stream and it is a source of water to this date. We collected a bottle of this water.

After luch at kumta, we reached Gokarna by 4 and there was an hour before the temple would open. So we spent about half hour in the Gokarna beach. Swimming is not recommended here and so we dint enter the water. There are too many westerners here. I guess it is because of its prximity to Goa / Karwar. we couldn't make it to Karwar as we dint get any hotels. In fact we didnt get any in Gokarna and we were returning to Murudeshwar that night.

We decided to go to Om beach (named after the shape of the beach, you can see it behind aadi in the next photo) for the sunset. This is the best beach I have been to so far. A quite secluded beach. The water here is as calm as possible. Spotting dophins during the boat ride was fun. The beach side resort can be accessed by boats only. The only negative point, I saw only westerners on those beach resorts. I was told they are too expensive for Indians.Not sure how expensive :(.

Aadi and Mahesha were back into the water and I was happy watching from the rocks and waited for the beautiful sunset. later we went to the Ganesha temple and the Mahabaleshwara temple. No banian and shirt for boys and men. I was surprised to see Mahesha comply immediately. The more surprising aspect was he even got an elaborate pooja done and he was lost in it. He was very pleased with the priest and made some generous offerings.I was happy i could touch the athma linga. There are very few hindu temples which allow you to touch the deity. Even at Ganesha temple you can offer pooja yourself if you had had a bath before coming to the temple. This was a pleasant surprise to me. We spent some time at the Parvathi temple and then were ready for some eats.

I was again surprised to see a small eating joint with Indian name filled with westerners and then realised it was run by westerners. It was houseful and the boy at the counter, a westerner, spoke in perfect local kannada and directed us to the Pai restaurant nearby. After the Dosa eats I realised I had not been to the rest room since we left Murudeswar. Thatz when I realised these places are definitely not women friendly when it comes to these matters. Finally found a decent place at the bus stop. The worst was at Kollur. So ladies beware.

We reached back Murudeshwar by around 10 pm later that night.