What can you say about a place where the local deity is a wandering spirit who wears outsized sandals And a region so wild that the milestones are painted yellow and green for fear of marauding elephants. For some obscure reason, wild elephants in these parts get so peeved by white milestones that they pull them out and fling them around. The Forest Department recently pulled one of these specimens out of a tree. Welcome to BR Hills.
BR Hills, short and sweet for Biligiri Rangana Betta, used to be a mere temple on a hillock with a rarely visited wildlife sanctuary nearby. That's until Jungle Lodges transformed it into the wildest vacationing spot in Karnataka. The range stretches from north to south for about 16 km and takes its name from the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple, which stands atop its highest point. Though Biligiri in Kannada means white mountain (the granite cliffs here have turned white due to erosion), the name is clearly a misnomer. The entire area is a thick forest of green dotted by deciduous trees and patches of shola rainforest.
Not that Lord Rangaswamy the patron deity of these forests is your average kind of god. His temple houses a pair of outsized sandals measuring one foot and nine inches! Local legend contends that Rangaswamy uses these sandals to roam the adjoining forests. Almost as if by logical extension, the sandals wear out and are replaced by the villagers who claim they are alerted about it in their dreams. If your adventure quotient is high, the fun doesn't end just here. There's the BRT (Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple) Wildlife Sanctuary with its wild denizens, the Soliga tribes who are the oldest inhabitants of these forests and the odd signboard that warns you of the most elusive creature of the forests Veerappan! Now that's what I call a really wild weekend...