Colors Galore – A short Break at Mugilu, Sakleshpur

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Highway tales, mugilu, sakleshpur, travel, travel tales, weekend break from bangalore

The gorgeous colors of Mugilu

Couple of weekends ago, while the child was in my mum’s house in Delhi for the summer vacation, me and N decided to take off on a small couple getaway. A break with just the two of us after 5 years. We didn’t really a lot of time since we were both taking a longish break in May for trip to Kufri and Delhi (and for N even beyond to Kaza and Spiti) we decided we will do only a three trip and hence began the search for places around. Being the travel lovers that we are, we had done most of the people that were coming up in searches and recos and then suddenly Cookie mentioned Mugilu, I saw the website and had a faint recollection that someone else had recoed it to me too and remembered it was Ruth. We called and booked the place without further delay. Mugilu is in Sakleshpur which is a small hilly town in the Malnad region. Mugilu is about 263kms from Bangalore and can be reached via the Bangalore-Mangalore Highway (here is the google map). Most of the roads are great apart from a small stretch where there was some construction going on and it was all dug up. When we drove through, the roads on either side were covered with flaming red flowers, sugarcane vendors in parts too, there was also a small part where the road was completely covered with a canopy of red flowers. What a site it was.

The other bad patch of road was the last stretch to Mugilu after taking a detour from the main State Highway, it was a mud road but the driving enthusiasts that we are we actually loved that and were zipping away flying loads some dust behind us and when we reached Mugilu we saw a sign that read “Bad roads lead to great destinations” and we were like bad roads, where? when?

yes thats us 🙂

Mugilu is a lovely place if you want to do nothing and just chill out,  read some books, take endless walks in the coffee estate exploring new leaves that are growing, the fruits and veggies they grow, some random stuff here and there.

Some lovely sights we captured during our walks

There also is a pretty big meadow just behing Mugilu where you can take well some more walks, what we did there apart from taking walks was try our hands at some drifting. An open meadow, a car that can catch speed, no traffic its a perfect recipe for drifting 🙂

Beyond the meadow if you keep walking is a small stream around which we can take some more walks. I am told there is a fort and a church that are close by and should or can be visited but we were a lazy couple in that holiday and did nothing of that sort.

Mugilu is run by a very sweet couple Sapna & Chandan who are from Bangalore too but moved to Sakleshpur some years ago in search of a quieter life, what they are doing almost seems like the dream I had retiring in peace in the hills while I am young, just that they have taken the plunge while I have not. We spent a lot of time with them talking about just anything that we would fancy from the planters club and how people behave there to how fireflies would take over Mugilu in June (next year I am so going there to check that out) to food and how they get around buying that property.  During our chats it turned out that Chandan & Sapna enjyong offroading too and own a jeep for that and that made the conversations much more interesting 🙂 The food at Mugilu is lovely too, fuss free local cuisine, I loved the akki rotis and chicken curries that I eat there.

Shunti – The dog at Mugilu, we so fell in love with her. She accompanied us to all our walks 🙂

Another thing that is lovely about Mugilu is that it is a pet friendly homestay, while we were there, there actually was a family that had come with a pet of their own dog which was happy being there and making friends with Shunti but couldn’t get along with the other dog they had because of which we couldn’t get around making friends with him

While you are in Mugilu one thing you should not miss is the sunset, gorgeous colors

In short, I recommend Mugilu to everyone who wants to do a short do nothing vacation a short drive away from Bangalore and they tell me its gorgeous while it rains

Reservation and tariff details on their website here and FB page here