Unakoti travel guide

Unakoti means “one less than a crore” in Bengali. It is an area in Tripura housing huge rock reliefs of Shiva. It is one of the main travel destinations in Tripura, and it is usually in the list of all travellers visiting the state. Note that despite its name “Unakoti”, the place does not have “one less than a crore” rock arts!! This post provides an experience of our visit to Unakoti during the recent trip to Tripura and also some tips that would help people planning to visit this place.

How to reach Unakoti? Train or Taxi?

Agartala to Unakoti distance is about 150 km on winding roads. Though the place can be visited as a day trip from Agartala, it would be a long drive of about 4-5 hours each way. It did not look exciting for us to travel in a car for such a long duration. The other option was to travel by train, which looked very convenient. We booked the morning 6:30 Agartala-Dharmanagar passenger train.

The train station was on the southern part of Agartala, and our hotel was on the other side. Since we were not sure about the availability of autos during that time on the road, we booked the auto in advance. Hotel guys helped us in this regard.

I must say that I was disappointed with the condition of the train. It had an old look, and it seemed like Indian Railways dumped these old coaches to Tripura. Nevertheless, the train was on time.

By the way, we did not find anyone selling food items on the train. We had our “packed breakfast” in the form of bakery items, and that solved the problem.

Kumarghat or Dharmanagar?

Unakoti is almost at equal distance from the train stations of Kumaraghat and Dharmanagar. Since Kumaraghat came before Dharmanagar, it made sense to get down at that place. It would save us more than an hour. But many people mentioned that it would be risky to get down at Kumarghat as it was a smaller town and vehicles may not be available to travel to Unakoti. Hence, I had booked the ticket to Dharmanagar. Later, I felt that I should have checked with Arun Bharadwaj who had visited Tripura earlier.

As the train approached Kumaraghat, Sankara mentioned that the town looked fairly big and we saw autos on the road. We ditched the online advice and got down at Kumaraghat. As we came out of the station, we were surrounded by drivers!! Within a few minutes, we managed a good deal with an Ertiga driver.

Travel to Unakoti

It took about 45-60 minutes to reach Unakoti. After crossing Kumaraghat town, the road went through various villages. We bypassed the town of Kailashahar to reach Unakoti. Kailashahar town has an airport, but it is currently not in use. The driver stopped at the parking lot and told us that we could spend any amount of time that day.

 

There was no entry fee to Unakoti, but the bags were checked for food items. They allowed only water bottles. I think the authorities wanted to avoid people picnicking inside Unakoti.

At Unakoti

Unakoti is in hilly terrain, and it requires a good amount of walking on steps. As we started looking at the rock arts, I was wondering about the people who built these figures. Unfortunately, there is not much information about the history of the place, but historians date it between 7^th and 10^th century AD.

 

There are many stories of Unakoti. One of the legends says that Shiva was going to Varanasi with one Crore gods and goddess. They stopped at Unakoti at night, and Shiva had warned them to leave before dawn. But they failed to wake up, and Shiva cursed them to become stone sculptures.

 

The biggest and most famous statue (that you normally see in photos) is Unakotishwar Kal Bhairav, 30 feet carving. The Shiva is flanked by female figures on both sides, represented by Goddess Durga and Ganga.

 

Another important rock art is of Ganesha situated next to a stream. There are also many idols carved on stones in addition to rock art.

 

We spent about 2 hours at Unakoti. The weather was pleasant making our visit very smooth. Summer season could be tough.

Lunch time

We came back to the parking area and found a food van. He had just arrived and was preparing the food. We were the first customers of that day. The food we had (fried rice and noodles) was quite decent. The owner understood the importance of data!! While coming to Unakoti, we had seen him counting the number of people visiting the place, and he prepared food based on those numbers.

Return to Agartala – change in plan

Some of the online reviews had misguided us by mentioning that it would take 4-5 hours in Unakoti. But two hours was more than enough for us. I had booked return ticket on 5:30 PM train from Kumaraghat based on these reviews. We had gained an hour as we got down at Kumaraghat and spent less time in Unakoti than estimated. It looked like we had to spend nearly 3 hours at Kumaraghat railway station.

 

There was a train coming from Silchar at 2:20 PM and we thought that we could try to board that train. We were a bit taken aback looking at the crowd in the railway station. It seemed like the trains were the most popular mode of transport in this part of Tripura. The person at the ticket counter also told that it will not be possible for us to get a seat in the general compartment. But we decided to try our luck.

In the meantime, we decided to try our luck in the reserved compartment, but that required an agreement with the ticket collector. Since the train stopped only for 2 minutes, we had to act fast. We looked at the coach layout to find the AC coach. Ticket collector would normally be at AC Coach. As the train arrived, we saw the TC getting down from 3^rd AC. I quickly reached him and told him that we had an open ticket and asked whether there were any vacant seats in the reserved compartment. He asked us to board the 2S coach and gave us the seat numbers.

We had assumed that we just need to pay the difference between the open ticket and reserved seat. Later, we were told by TC that we also had to pay fine. While the difference amount was very less, the fine amount was several times more!! Of course, TC hinted about paying less money to him, but we decided to go by rules and pay the actual amount and get the receipt. A lesson learnt!!

Few points

• Train is the best mode of transport to reach Unakoti. Use taxi if you also plan to travel to other nearby areas like Jampui hills.
• Two hours is good enough time to spend in Unakoti.
• Very few visitors were there in the morning when we visited. Locals mainly visited in the afternoon.
• If you are travelling from Agartala, it makes sense to get down at Kumaraghat. If not a taxi, you can easily get autos.
• There are no good restaurants in the area. Best bet is the food van at the entrance of Unakoti. We heard that he may not come if the numbers are very less.
• There are no good places to stay near Unakoti. The town of Kumaraghat, Kailashahar and Dharmanagar have some basic hotels (Ex: Hotel Kalpataru Inn in Kumaraghat)