Places to Visit in Sakleshpur

A commission-free story of the Hoysala temple trail — the 12th–13th-century star-platform temples of Belur, Halebidu and Somanathapura, now UNESCO's Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas, and the quieter Hoysala shrines around them.

The building gives you its story in horizontal bands, and it gives them in a deliberate order. Walk the terrace before you go inside, and read upward.

Forty were carved. Thirty-eight are still there. One holds a mirror, one has a parrot on her hand, one is having her sari pulled by a monkey — and the town has spent eight centuries saying they are the queen.

A coffee-and-cardamom hill town on the Bengaluru–Mangaluru ghat: Tipu Sultan's star-shaped Manjarabad Fort, the Bisle ghat rainforest viewpoint, working-estate homestays, the honest story of the old railway 'Green Route', and the Hoysala temples an easy drive east.

Two UNESCO temples, twenty-one and a half kilometres apart, both doable properly in a day if you get the order and the midday break right.

A great temple that looks flat-topped, and 118 inscriptions in the courtyard explaining exactly why. The building is its own archive.

A few thousand people, one street of shops, and behind the wall at the end of it a temple that a king began in 1117. Belur is small, and that is the whole point of it.