Yesterday we went to Mysore for the day, the guys at the office had talked about organising a trip for us but I guess the Americans couldn't wait so they arranged for the driver to be at the hotel on Sunday morning at 07.30 to take us out for the day. I had intended to go to Mysore for a weekend at some point, possibly by train but thought I'd go along for the day anyway, I could always go back again.

We had a bigger car so that everybody could fit into the one vehicle and the driver was the one the merkins normally have, mine was driving his boss home for the weekend, a 12 hour round trip. I got the front seat, which meant that I got to the full on driving experience. There were a couple of times when I thought I might need clean trousers as he was driving fast and very aggressively. We were going right behind cars, changing from lane to lane, overtaking on the left, on the right, between cars all the while the horn just kept blowing. The road itself was surprisingly good quality for most of the way. It's been resurfaced and widened almost the entire way there are just a few stretches where the work is still ongoing. On some of the new stretches through villages you can see corners missing from buildings where they were demolished to make way for the road. The rest of the building may still be standing and of course there are people still living in it…

At first the scenery was nothing special but about 40 kilometres outside Bangalore there were the first of these huge rocky mountains jutting out of the plains. They are strange things, not much vegetation on them, just these massive lumps of granite several hundred metres high in a dusty landscape. I didn't get any photos, as we were too busy driving at high speed.

Further along the road the landscape got flatter as we entered the Cauvery River valley. There was a lot more greenery with coconut palms, mango trees, banana plantations and rice paddies. I even saw some peasants using water buffalo to pull a manual plough on their tiny piece of land.

Just outside Mysore we visited Tipu's summer palace:


and the nearby temple complex :

where we seemed to somehow acquire an ancient guide who talked non-stop for about twenty minutes, I could understand maybe a quarter of what he was saying, and then demanded 200 rupee for the privilege. There was a comment from somebody in the group about how it was disgusting that a place of worship was set up to sell things and take money off you. As always I bit my tongue, not mentioning the fact that some cathedrals charge entrance, all churches have donation boxes and most religions have taken money from people since the dawn of time.

Then we went into Mysore proper which seems to be quite a nice sleepy little town. We drove up Chamundi Hill, one of southern India's most sacred sites, with the driver overtaking traffic on blind bends and me praying to whichever gods would listen. The view from the top was spectacular, and there were of course thousands of people everywhere. Being westerners all the sales-people and kids quickly latched onto us, asking the usual conversation started of 'which country you from sir?' Unless you want to find yourself with a hanger-on asking for cash for the next hour, the best thing is to just ignore them and keep walking. There were several people trying to sell me photos of the temples and the view, which seemed a bit pointless as I was in the process of taking photos of those very things… Oh, and there were monkeys and a very large stone bull:




Then out driver took us to a 'craft factory', which admittedly did have some craftsmen working on some fairly nice wooden furniture, but was basically just a hard sell tourist trap. This is pretty common, as the driver will normally get a commission from the shop for every tourist they bring in. The woman running things seemed quite upset that I didn't want to keep looking at things and preferred to just hang out outside watching the world go by. Needless to say, two member of the group ended up buying various items.

Then we went to the palace, which is spectacular. You cannot bring cameras inside and have to leave them in a locker before entering but you can take photos from outside:



There are loads more photos here.

The inside is amazing with beautiful carved ceilings, intricate inlays of ivory on the doors, courtyards and halls. You are not allowed to wear shoes inside and when we got out the ground was so hot that it was impossible to walk very far, you end up just running from one patch of shade to the next!

Then it was time for the long trip back. We did manage to get a puncture just outside Bangalore but it was quickly repaired and we were back just before dark. It was a bit ambitious to try and do everything in one day, but still a very nice little trip.

When I got into the office today, one of the guys asked what we'd been up to so I told him and he looked a bit disappointed. He went on to say that as he'd promised a while ago, he'd arranged for a weekend in Mysore with the company…I though the merkins had checked with him before organising the trip yesterday but apparently not…