Mysore Palace

Originally uploaded by neilmadhvani.

Mysore is another city in the state of Karnataka, located about 160km from Bangalore and connected by a fairly modern highway for most of the way. Mysore is famous for its silk sarees and sandalwood products, including incense sticks, fragrant soap and pungent oils. On the way to Mysore, we stopped at Srirangapatnam – here stand the ruins of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan’s capital, from where they ruled much of southern India during the 18th century. The onion-domed Gumbaz is Tipu’s mausoleum and is also the burial site for much of his family. We also went to the Daria Daulat Bagh, which was Tipu’s Summer Palace and now houses a museum containing family memorabilia and paintings depicting his campaigns against the British.

Mysore itself has some wonderful sights – the key attraction is without a doubt the fabulous Mysore Palace which is breathtaking in size and beauty. Inside there is a kaleidoscope of stained glass, mirrors and enormous ceiling paintings. We also went to Chamundi Hill which contains the Sri Chamundeswari Temple and offers excellent views of Mysore. It definitely feels a lot warmer in Mysore than Bangalore – I suspect it was around 36C – a bit too hot to walk around in for long periods of time – even though I must have guzzled 4 or 5 litres of water yesterday!

In the evening we went to Brindavan Gardens, about 20 minutes drive from the city. Enormous crowds flock here each night to see the illuminated fountains to the accompaniment of film tunes. The display itself wasn’t as impressive as others I’ve seen (Sentosa Island in Singapore has an incredible sound & light show) but it was great fun being amongst so many people who had probably only seen this kind of attraction for the first time – there were so many “wows” and “oooooooohs” from the crowd

I’ve added some photos from Mysore at my Flickr photo gallery.

On a slightly different note, a few days a ago I bought myself a “teach yourself Hindi” book – on this trip I’ve realised that having at least a reasonable grasp of the language would be very useful. Although I can understand around 60% right now due to the similarities with Gujarati, I find it very hard to speak the language as I’m always worried about making huge grammar mistakes. Luckily the alphabet and character set between the two languages isn’t that different, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to improve my Hindi before my next trip to India.

Today is our last in Bangalore – planning to check out a few remaining sights and perhaps do a bit of shopping – Bangalore is a great place to buy books, which are sold at a fraction of our prices.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 5:14 am and is filed under Travel, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.