Bangalore to Kolli Hills Taxi

Bangalore to Kolli Hills taxi: distance and route

Kolli Hills is about 356 km from Bangalore, a drive of 6 to 7 hours. The route runs via Hosur, Krishnagiri and Salem on NH44, then east towards Rasipuram and Senthamangalam before climbing off the plain at Semmedu, where the ghat road up into the hills begins. It is highway for most of the distance; only the last stretch, up through the hills themselves, is slow going.

The hairpin road up

The climb into Kolli Hills is built around a continuous run of hairpin bends — most sources count around 70 of them packed into a little over fifteen kilometres, though the exact number varies slightly depending on how each bend is counted. The road, known locally as the Kollimalai Ghat Road, was built during British rule to open up access to the hills, and it remains a narrow, steadily climbing route rather than a fast one. It is not a road to be driving after dark for the first time, and we plan Kolli Hills pickups with enough daylight in hand to take the bends at a sensible pace rather than racing the light.

Semmedu and the country of Valvil Ori

The hill town at the top, Semmedu, is the headquarters of Kolli Hills and takes its place in Tamil history seriously: it was once ruled by Valvil Ori, a Chera-era chieftain celebrated in Sangam poetry as one of the seven great philanthropist kings of the age, remembered for his generosity as much as for his skill with a bow. A statue of Ori stands in the town today, and the state government holds a cultural and tourism festival in his name at Semmedu every August, drawing villagers from across the hills the way it is said his own subjects once gathered for the Aadi festival in his time. The hills today are still home to their own people rather than being purely a tourist destination: by the last census, close to 96 percent of the roughly 40,000 residents of Kolli Hills belonged to the Malayali tribal community, whose ancestors are said to have migrated here from Kanchipuram generations ago and who still follow a traditional village governance system alongside the modern panchayat.

A quieter hill range in the Eastern Ghats

Unlike Ooty or Kodaikanal, both in the Western Ghats and both firmly on the tourist circuit, Kolli Hills sits in the Eastern Ghats, in Namakkal district, and sees a fraction of the visitor numbers. At an altitude of roughly 1,300 metres it carries a genuinely cool climate, with coffee, cardamom, pepper, jackfruit, hill banana and pineapple all grown on the slopes. The hills also carry a long-standing reputation in traditional medicine: local belief holds that Siddha practitioners once lived and worked in caves within the sacred groves here, and the forest still yields a wide range of medicinal plants that villagers gather and sell. For passengers who have already done Ooty or Kodaikanal and want a hill station without the crowds, this is the genuine offbeat alternative rather than a marketing label.

The millet belt and its revival

Kolli Hills has grown minor millets on its terraced slopes for generations, and the local cuisine is still built around them rather than rice. For years the crop was fading as farmers switched to cassava and other more profitable produce, until the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation began working with growers here to bring it back — organising a federation of more than 1,600 farming families, now structured as its own farmer producer company, around conserving traditional millet varieties and building a market for them. The effort is credited with raising both millet production and farmer incomes in the hills by roughly a fifth to a quarter over the years since, and it is part of why small-millet dishes on a Kolli Hills menu are not a tourist gimmick but simply what the hills have always eaten.

Agaya Gangai and the temple

The hills' best-known natural sight is the Agaya Gangai waterfall, reached from near the Arapaleeswarar Shiva temple by a descent of close to a thousand steps cut into the hillside. It is a proper undertaking rather than a roadside stop — worth building a couple of hours into the day for the climb back up — and it rewards those who make the descent with one of the more dramatic waterfalls in this part of Tamil Nadu.

Seeku Parai and the view back down

Near Semmedu, a short distance off the main road through the hills, is the Seeku Parai viewpoint, a rock outcrop with an open, roughly 180-degree view across the valleys and ridgelines below. It is one of the few spots in Kolli Hills set up specifically for the view rather than for a temple or a waterfall, and it is a natural stop either on the way up or on the way back down through the hairpins.

Booking from Bangalore

We pick up across Bangalore and from Kempegowda International Airport, where the driver meets arriving flights with a name board and waits free of charge if the flight is delayed. One driver takes the car the whole way, including the climb through the hairpins. Tolls and any state permit charges are charged as actuals, and because this is a one-way drop you pay only for the 356 km from Bangalore to Kolli Hills, not for the car's return leg.