Hyderabad Weekend Getaway: Medak

Medak is approximately 100 KM away from Hyderabad and it roughly takes about 2:30 hours to reach there. My initial research about the city revealed that, there isn’t much to see except for a beautiful church and some ruins of a fort. The only reason I decided to visit Medak was because I wanted to visit it.

We started at around 8:00 AM in the morning… had breakfast at the outskirts of Hyderabad and reach Medak by around 11:00 AM.

It was a Sunday morning and Medak Church was jam packed. Spend an hour observing people in the Church… most of them had no clue about Christianity but were there because they had problems and someone had told them to visit this Church. Post the sermon, people gathered in a queue to take the blessings of the father. Unlike they show in movies, where there is separate chamber for discussing stuff with father, here, it was all in open. Will describe what I heard in some other post.

After lunch, I visited the fort. There isn’t much left in the fort, although government is renovating the fort. One can visit the fort, which is situated on top of a hill to get a good view of the Medak town.

Started the journey back from Medak around 5 PM in the evening and reached Hyderabad by 7:30 PM.

View of Medak town from the top of the Medak fort:

Hyderabad Weekend Getaway: Gooty Fort

About 300 KM away from Hyderabad towards Bangalore, Gooty is a small town that will be one day famous as the town where a Nobel Prize winner was born. For the time being, Gooty is known for a historic fort. About 10 Km away from Gooty, archeologists have discovered a stone on which constitution belonging to Ashoka is written. This means, that this area was inhibited by civilized people since 2000 years. The fort of Gooty is an amalgamation of Hindu-Islamic architecture. The most hurting aspect is that, Archeological department of India and Andhra Pradesh Tourism has done nothing to protect/preserve this beautiful fort.

Trip Details:

Gooty was earlier situated on NH7 but now NH7 bypasses the town. It’s approx. 300 KM away from Hyderabad and the distance can be covered within 3.5 – 4 hours. We started around 6:00 AM in the morning and reached Gooty by 10:00 AM in the afternoon. We were told that, best time to visit the fort is on any festival day… as lot of locals would be visiting fort and it would be lot secure.

It takes approximately 2 hours to climb the fort. If you are photography enthusiast, then you would be spending well-over 4 hours to climb the fort as there’s lots of stuff to be photographed. There are no restaurants/food carts on top of the fort… you need to carry the food along with you.