Chikkamagaluru: a peak, a team, and a town on the Tunga

I have been to the same district three times and taken a different kind of trip each time. First alone, to stand on the highest point in Karnataka. Then with my entire team, to sleep in the ghats. Then for one day, to a temple town on a river, where I did essentially nothing.

That sequence is the only useful thing I have to say about Chikkamagaluru, so here it is in order.

The peak, and what I wrote on it

Mullayanagiri is the highest point in Karnataka — a little over 1,900 metres, which is nothing by Himalayan standards and quite a lot for a state most people picture as flat and hot.

I got there in October 2022, near the start of a two-week loop out of Bengaluru. The honest version is that I went because it was the highest thing around and I wanted to have stood on it.

Two things I wrote up there:

Karnataka's highest peak!

and, the same day:

Truth Or Happiness; Never Both.

I no longer agree with the second one. It is the kind of line a summit makes you write — you have climbed a thing, the view is enormous, and it feels like the moment demands a verdict about life. The peak is genuinely worth the drive. The verdict was scenery talking.

Practical bit: you can drive nearly to the top and walk the last stretch of steps, which is exactly why the last few kilometres are lined with parked cars on any weekend. Go on a weekday, go early, and the same road is empty.

Then I brought the whole team

In February 2023 I came back with SPURGE — the whole team, into the ghats near Mudigere, to hike and camp.

I travel alone almost always, and this is the one entry on this site where that is not true. It worked better than it had any right to. A company that mostly sees each other through screens spent two days walking uphill with no signal, and it did more than any offsite in a hotel conference room was ever going to.

The dog came too, which tells you the standard of trip this was.

If you run something small, this is the version of a team offsite I would recommend: not a resort with a whiteboard, but a hill, a walk, and everyone carrying their own bag.

Sringeri, which is the opposite of a summit

I passed through Sringeri on the 2022 loop, the way everybody does — a stop between two other places. In February 2024 I drove back for it on its own.

It is a very old town on the Tunga, one of the four seats of learning associated with Adi Shankara, and the river runs right through the middle of it. There is no viewpoint. There is nothing to summit. You sit by the water, the fish come to the steps because people have been feeding them there for generations, and that is the entire offering.

The distance between how I travelled to Mullayanagiri and how I travelled to Sringeri is two years, one district, and most of what I have learned about this.

The Malnad is the drive

Everything above happened inside the Malnad — the ghat country of Karnataka's western belt — and the roads are the actual attraction.

The Charmadi ghat is the one to take. It drops from the plateau toward the coast in a long sequence of hairpins through forest, it is narrow, and it is one of the best drives in South India. Take it instead of the fast highway through Hassan even when it costs you two hours. On this trip the two hours were the point, not the tax.

This is also where coffee in India starts. The story goes that seven beans came back from Yemen in the seventeenth century and were planted on the hills above Chikkamagaluru — the range still carries the name of the man credited with it. Every estate you drive past is downstream of that.

Coorg or Chikkamagaluru

I get asked this, because they are both coffee, both hills, both a similar drive from Bengaluru, and both fully booked every long weekend.

They are not the same trip.

Coorg is the one you leave for on a Thursday with no plan. It is closer, it is softer, and its value is that going there does not have to be an occasion.

Chikkamagaluru has the elevation and the better roads. It rewards a plan — a peak with a real summit, ghats worth driving for their own sake, a town like Sringeri that needs a whole day to make sense. Go when you want the driving to be the reason.

If you only go to one, and you want a weekend, go to Coorg. If you want a drive, come here.