Dodda Alada Mara..

..literally translates into 'Big Banyan Tree' is a place around 30 Kms from Bengaluru on Mysore road(heading west) and little did we know that's where we would head to last saturday. After a yummy breakfast of nice soft idlis, crisp vada and piping hot coffee at Adigas we headed off on an aimless wander from sanjaynagar on saturday morning. Thanks to the lovely Bangalore weather neither of us wanted to idle away time inside an AC cinema theatre or hang out in a crowded mall. So next came the question of where do we go? And bangalore is no longer one of those places where you can have a lazy chilled out relaxed time in the city, and hence finding something on the outskirts was what we got thinking about. Me being me, suggested we go to Majestic and figure it out there. So we got into a bus and due to the great divide inside the bus, we got off at the next bus stop, by now going to majestic idea was struck off. And after a few more minutes of aimless wandering we decided to take a taxi, and then decide where to go :-) yeah, vehicle first, destination next. And to our luck Meru would operate only in city limits, so one option ruled out. Next was to find a private taxi, and finally owing to c's ingenious methods of travel we did get a taxi! literally out of the blue kinds and we had the taxi all to our disposal for the rest of the day. By now after some more discussing, Big Banyan tree it was, and the taxi headed out of the city. We took turns dozing off as the cab driver manipulated his way out of the usual bangalore traffic. We reached around 1-ish in the afternoon,  and its a small nice picnic kind of a place. Though the big banyan tree is one huge tree, it seems like a collection of trees, a wiki about the history of the tree reveals that the main root of the tree succumbed to natural disease, and thus the tree looks like many different trees now, It would be a lovely place for photography early in the morning, unfortunately we dint have a camera on us. After some chitter chatter we got hungry and started looking out for places to lunch, and Ruppi's it was. Its a resort 3-4 kms from the big banyan tree, which is owned by none other than the kannada movie hero Uppi (Upendra, remember the number olu bari olu :)), hence the name Ruppi, wonder what the R's for though. We had a simple and tasty lunch of rotis and chicken curry and wandered around the resort exploring it and then the rain gods started pouring, awesome weather though. After talking to the locals there, we headed off to a place called Minchina bele reservoir which is about 10 kms from big banyan tree. I was not very interested about going there, but c was super excited and wanted to go there, and so off we went and I'm glad c was excited about the whole thing, else we would have missed the best part of the whole trip. As we drove along the narrow serpentine roads we saw it, the lovely water body to our right, glistening in the afternoon sunshine and looked inviting. We drove along the mud roads, parked the taxi and took a nice long walk. The cachement area surrounded by hills, one of it being the quite famous savandurga hill was very peaceful and serene. All this just around 35 Kms from bangalore, wow! It was now time to head back to the city and we left happy and relaxed, again watching the country side go past us as we drove by.. till we were jolted back to reality when we first heard the incessant honking on mysore road.... but no complaints, nature wins, yet again :-)