The Best Places to Visit in Karnataka, Beyond Bengaluru

Karnataka has more range than any other state in South India, and it gets a fraction of the attention Kerala does. In one state you have the Western Ghats, a 300km coastline, the ruins of an empire, and three distinct food cultures. Most visitors see Bengaluru and Mysore and stop there. Here is what the rest of it looks like.

Coorg, for the coffee country

Kodagu — everyone calls it Coorg — sits high in the Ghats and grows a third of India’s coffee. The comparison to Scotland is about the mist, which arrives most mornings and burns off by ten. Stay on a working plantation rather than a resort; the difference is that someone will walk you through the estate and explain what you are drinking.

• Best window: October to March, or June for the monsoon if you like rain
• Give it three days minimum — two is a drive, not a trip
• Abbey Falls before 9am, or not at all
• Eat Kodava: pandi curry and akki roti, not hotel North Indian

Hampi, for the ruins

Hampi is the strangest landscape in India: forty square kilometres of granite boulders with the remains of Vijayanagara scattered through it. In the 1500s this was one of the richest cities on earth. Sunrise from Matanga Hill over the Tungabhadra is, for my money, the best view in South India — and you will often have it to yourself.

Hire a bicycle and give yourself two full days. Hampi rewards wandering more than it rewards a checklist.

Gokarna, for the coast

Gokarna is what Goa was three decades ago: a temple town with a string of beaches reachable mainly on foot. Om Beach is the busy one. Walk twenty minutes further to Half Moon or Paradise and the crowd disappears. Go before the road improves.

Putting it together

The mistake is trying to do all three in a week. Hampi and Gokarna pair well — they are five hours apart and the contrast works. Coorg belongs to a separate trip, with Mysore on the way. Do two things properly.