Mysore Trip...
Last Saturday we went on a trip to Mysore. We drove all the way from Bangalore and came back on the same day. We used SH-17 (Bangalore-Mysore State Highway) for our travel.
Our first stop being Sangam at Srirangapatna. A Sangam is a sanskrit word meaning confluence. At Allahabad its the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. This sangam at Srirangapatna is different. Actually the town of Srirangapatna is an island and is enclosed by the river Kaveri. So the point where the river Kaveri meets back again is called Sangam.
The river Kaveri is sacred for the people in this part of India. And the people you see in the photograph above were actually going to perform some puja on those small islands in the river. Our next stop was the Dariya Daulat bagh. It used to be summer palace of Tipu Sultan built in year 1784.
As the description says, its made up of wood and work done on those wood is huge and amazing. Imagine something like that, wholly made up wood and still standing intact after 200+ years. And that's not just all, there are some great paintings containing lots of details. Sad that we are not allowed to take photographs of those. Anyways!
Then our next stop was Sriranganathaswamy temple from whom the town derives its name.
The uniqueness of this temple is that there is a huge idol of God Vishnu showing the God in resting position while most of the idols depict the God standing upright. From here we moved ahead to Mysore city. It started raining that made the journey even more pleasant. I must say, the weather Gods were in a very good mood that day, for we didn't have to face any kind of heat during anytime of our trip . It was either clouded or drizzling. In Mysore we first headed towards the Mysore palace.
One small note from the palace experience. We reached the wrong gate of the palace and thought that the entrance is closed. When we asked people over there they said the correct entrance is on the other side but the entry time is over and there is some 1 hr time before it opens again. And they suggested by that time we can probably cover one silk Saree shop where we can get good Mysore Silk Sarees. We believed on their "palace closure thing" but since we were not interested in buying Sarees we proceeded further ignoring their suggestion. And instead of going towards our next destination, we went to the correct gate of the palace and to our surprise the palace was open. It is actually open all day starting from some 10am in morning to 4/5pm in the evening.
The most interesting thing about Mysore palace is its special lighting done on Sunday evenings. It is done for very small duration but the palace looks really beautiful and grand in that lighting. We could obviously not cover the lighting phenomena so we proceeded towards some lunch destination. While coming out of the palace we found a gentleman playing the toy violin. I couldn't stop myself from taking his photograph. This toy violin, we used to pester our parents so much every now and then for buying. The sellers used to be so expert in playing it. And in our hands they used to get ruined within hours. This person was also an expert in playing it.
We again asked for suggestions from local vendors and everyone was pointing to a particular hotel nearby. But this time we didn't want to fall for the sponsored hotel kind of things because from our experience we have found out that these hotels sponsored by local vendors or autovallas are of very poor quality. To our surprise hotel Ramanashree turned out be better than our expectations especially when while trying to avoid it we went to a nearby restaurant which was really bad and pathetic. There is one Bheema jewelers there very close to this hotel, we initially didn't notice the jeweler part and thought that it is from Bheema's chain of restaurants we have in Bangalore and almost parked our car there. Thankfully that realization happened well in time because we had two ladies there in our car, taking them to a jewellery's shop is like you know what :-).
You must have noticed the book featured in the first photograph of this blog. The Mysore chapter in this Outlook Traveller's guide very clearly mentions all the good restaurants in Mysore and the timings of all the travel destinations. But somehow we were not reading it properly till someone pointed out during the lunch that all this information is there in the book as well. So we figured out that from the next time onwards we would be exploring the Devaraja Urs Road instead of random search for good food.
Next we proceeded towards Chamundi Hills. Before that, this is how Chamundi Hills looked like from Mysore Palace -
The weather on top of the hill was superb with misty misty atmosphere at the hill but clear sky to look down at the Mysore city.
The temple -
The Lalitha Mahal Palace from the hill -
From the Chamundi Hills we proceeded towards to Vrindavan Gardens popularly known as KRS (Krishna Raj Sagar) in Mysore and around. There again we had some nice time and more photographs -
By this time we had finished our travel quota for the day and we had to rush back to Bangalore. We traveled back on the same SH17 and the journey back home didn't even take 3 hours with intermittent rains and most of the time driving with headlights on. In all nice experience and a very long blog. :-D
~mks
Our first stop being Sangam at Srirangapatna. A Sangam is a sanskrit word meaning confluence. At Allahabad its the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. This sangam at Srirangapatna is different. Actually the town of Srirangapatna is an island and is enclosed by the river Kaveri. So the point where the river Kaveri meets back again is called Sangam.
The river Kaveri is sacred for the people in this part of India. And the people you see in the photograph above were actually going to perform some puja on those small islands in the river. Our next stop was the Dariya Daulat bagh. It used to be summer palace of Tipu Sultan built in year 1784.
As the description says, its made up of wood and work done on those wood is huge and amazing. Imagine something like that, wholly made up wood and still standing intact after 200+ years. And that's not just all, there are some great paintings containing lots of details. Sad that we are not allowed to take photographs of those. Anyways!
Then our next stop was Sriranganathaswamy temple from whom the town derives its name.
The uniqueness of this temple is that there is a huge idol of God Vishnu showing the God in resting position while most of the idols depict the God standing upright. From here we moved ahead to Mysore city. It started raining that made the journey even more pleasant. I must say, the weather Gods were in a very good mood that day, for we didn't have to face any kind of heat during anytime of our trip . It was either clouded or drizzling. In Mysore we first headed towards the Mysore palace.
One small note from the palace experience. We reached the wrong gate of the palace and thought that the entrance is closed. When we asked people over there they said the correct entrance is on the other side but the entry time is over and there is some 1 hr time before it opens again. And they suggested by that time we can probably cover one silk Saree shop where we can get good Mysore Silk Sarees. We believed on their "palace closure thing" but since we were not interested in buying Sarees we proceeded further ignoring their suggestion. And instead of going towards our next destination, we went to the correct gate of the palace and to our surprise the palace was open. It is actually open all day starting from some 10am in morning to 4/5pm in the evening.
The most interesting thing about Mysore palace is its special lighting done on Sunday evenings. It is done for very small duration but the palace looks really beautiful and grand in that lighting. We could obviously not cover the lighting phenomena so we proceeded towards some lunch destination. While coming out of the palace we found a gentleman playing the toy violin. I couldn't stop myself from taking his photograph. This toy violin, we used to pester our parents so much every now and then for buying. The sellers used to be so expert in playing it. And in our hands they used to get ruined within hours. This person was also an expert in playing it.
We again asked for suggestions from local vendors and everyone was pointing to a particular hotel nearby. But this time we didn't want to fall for the sponsored hotel kind of things because from our experience we have found out that these hotels sponsored by local vendors or autovallas are of very poor quality. To our surprise hotel Ramanashree turned out be better than our expectations especially when while trying to avoid it we went to a nearby restaurant which was really bad and pathetic. There is one Bheema jewelers there very close to this hotel, we initially didn't notice the jeweler part and thought that it is from Bheema's chain of restaurants we have in Bangalore and almost parked our car there. Thankfully that realization happened well in time because we had two ladies there in our car, taking them to a jewellery's shop is like you know what :-).
You must have noticed the book featured in the first photograph of this blog. The Mysore chapter in this Outlook Traveller's guide very clearly mentions all the good restaurants in Mysore and the timings of all the travel destinations. But somehow we were not reading it properly till someone pointed out during the lunch that all this information is there in the book as well. So we figured out that from the next time onwards we would be exploring the Devaraja Urs Road instead of random search for good food.
Next we proceeded towards Chamundi Hills. Before that, this is how Chamundi Hills looked like from Mysore Palace -
The weather on top of the hill was superb with misty misty atmosphere at the hill but clear sky to look down at the Mysore city.
The temple -
The Lalitha Mahal Palace from the hill -
From the Chamundi Hills we proceeded towards to Vrindavan Gardens popularly known as KRS (Krishna Raj Sagar) in Mysore and around. There again we had some nice time and more photographs -
By this time we had finished our travel quota for the day and we had to rush back to Bangalore. We traveled back on the same SH17 and the journey back home didn't even take 3 hours with intermittent rains and most of the time driving with headlights on. In all nice experience and a very long blog. :-D
~mks
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I also blogged about my Mysore trip at http://travellersdiary.wordpress.com
~mks