Daringbadi: Lone Hill Station in Odisha

We got ourselves a DJI Spark in December and decided that the local landscape didn’t do its camera system any justice. So began our three day trip to Daringbadi.

Daringbadi is situated 3000 ft above sea level in the district of Kandhmal. Considered by many to be the ‘Kashmir of Odisha’, this hill station is an ideal holiday destination in summer. We, being idiots, thought the middle of December was the right time to visit, when temperatures can easily go below zero. Luckily, we had a car and did not plan on staying long. We still managed to see snowfall during night. Although, people do come here on holidays during winter though the numbers are less.

The photography and videography started once we left Phulbani. There are many attractions on the way to the hill station, some of which have been captured.

We made our way to Balliguda, booked ourselves a hotel room and settled down for the night. The next day we got up early to make our way to Daringbadi. The waterfall you see here in the photos is Madubandha, which is very close to the hill station. Since we were short on time we skipped other tourist attractions and visited a coffee and black pepper farm. Also close by was an emu farm, where the birds are raised for their meat and oil. We also visited a turmeric farm.

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It was around noon when we returned to Balliguda. After lunch the next visit was to the Jaleswara Temple in Tumudibandha, a little far from Balliguda. We took some really good footage from the drone here. It is said that this 100 year old temple gets submerged when the rainwater floods the Tulsa river but it is available for worshippers the rest of the year. It houses a natural rock Shivalinga, a natural rock Nandi bull and an imprint of the Goddess Parvati on one side of the Linga. There is also a footprint on a nearby rock rumoured to be from Lord Hanuman.

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We stayed there for the entire afternoon and reached back to our hotel room quite late in the evening. The next day we set out back home, with a pit stop at Phulbani. We held a picnic in the surrounding forest and flew the drone by the shore of a water reservoir. Finally the trip ended with our day as we reached Bhubaneshwar at night.

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Sadly for us, some of the footage could not be retrieved from a stubborn iPhone so what you can see here is best we could find after wrestling with it and finally giving it up as a lost cause. However, what we have here is still quite good and it proved to be a good test of the Spark’s flight systems and camera module. Let’s hope the drone keeps helping us getting better in our content delivery.

We will one day return to Daringbadi and sample all it has to offer but it may take some time as we have other commitments. Still, no one knows what the future might bring. So, here’s hoping we revisit this place once more soon. Goodbye.