The long way to Bidar
Bidar is farther than Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa and Kanyakumari from Bangalore: 735 kms, a long distance even though it is in Karnataka.
We started on a Saturday morning in January and reached Hospet in the evening. In front of the hotel we stayed in, an idli shop had a mobile number and a website address(checked later and it was invalid) on its front board instead of the usual street address, talk about changing times! The next morning we asked the hotel owner about the route to Bidar: he took out his cellphone and called his friend from Bidar who regularly drives his Maruti car between Hospet and Bidar, and a few minutes later we had the most optimal route; the easiest way there would have taken us to Gulbarga but it was not what we wanted and not what we got: instead the route took us though the countryside through small unheard of towns, Gangawati(calling itself the Rice Town of India), Sindhnur, Lingsugur, Shorapur, Yadgir, Sedan and Chincholi.
We didn't cover this distance in a single day as we started after lunch from Hospet. Late in the evening, we ended up in what looked like a dhaba town: it had a checkpost and made a good place for a bunch of dhabas, there didn't seem to be much else happening there. After dinner we were on the lookout for a place to sleep, asking around to check if we could crash in one of the dhabas we got to know of the existence of a Inspection Bungalow(IB) in this small place; people said it was up the hill but nothing was visible in the darkness and it turned out that the hill referred to was just a hillock and just 50ft away from the main road. There was no one at the IB and we were informed that the guy incharge had gone to his home town for a festival. While the IB itself was closed, it did have a nice compound around it and we slept next to the building in the compound as an almost full moon rose from one side of the hillock.
Joladha Rotti is one of the unique dishes of North Karnataka and the first chance we had to try it was at a small restaurant on the outskirts of Chincholi. Available as either soft or hard, we went for the hard Katak; traditionally workers in the fields used to carry a pack of hard Katak along with Chutney Pudi for lunch. The hard and dry Rotti does not spoil in the hot dry weather and can be stored for many days. We finally reached Bidar in the evening and checked into the Mayura Barid Shahi which was neat as it seemed to have been recently renovated.
North-Karnataka, January, 2008
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deepsan) wrote,
