India - 10 Weeks in a New Land (Part 3)
Near the end of our time in Bangalore, we decided to go to Mysore. It’s the most popular nearby city to Bangalore, because it has a palace and other tourist-y places to visit. Mysore is about 3 hours away by car, and I wasn’t sure originally whether I cared to go or not. Taking a train at 6:30am to go see a palace? Maybe not worth it. But the boys wanted to go, and actually organised it so I didn’t have to! We decided to take a car with a driver via our hotel, and leave at 7:30am.
Work weeks are 6 days long here, so I had to get up really early on my one day off (Sunday). We ate breakfast and then our driver showed up and we were on our way slightly later than planned, at 7:45am. Gopalin was our driver’s name, and he owns a vintage car of some sort that he drove us around in. It’s one of those cars that is as solid as a rock, and probably would just bounce off of other vehicles if there was a collision. It was comfortable enough, except for the finicky passenger-side door, which decided to open up on the highway at one point. No harm done, and it behaved itself after that.
Photo: Highway from Bangalore to Mysore
The scenery along the highway from Bangalore to Mysore is lovely. The soil is reddish-brown in colour, and it’s hilly. So there are place where you see tall hills with an exposed red rock face. There are a lot more trees once you leave Bangalore city limits, and there are also tiered farms along the way. It is a bit more ‘wild’ but also more quaint, and maybe more along the lines of what people might think of when they think of India.
We went to Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace which is on the way to Mysore. We were at a part of it that is one small corner of a larger compound, so there may have been a more impressive building elsewhere. The one we were at was small and serves as a museum. It did have some impressive murals on the wall though.
We went to actual Mysore Palace, where you have to take your shoes off to go inside and people were crammed wall to wall in parts of it. It is well-maintained compared to Bangalore Palace, and there are a lot of intricate carvings and painted designs on the walls and doors throughout. There are even a set of solid silver doors at one point. I’m not sure what they lead to, because they are closed and you can’t go through them, but that was an impressive sight. The whole palace is just part of the larger compound, which has extensive grounds and fancy entrance gates on each side of the property.
Photo: Mysore Palace
You have to pay separate admission to tour the residential building next to the palace. We did that as well, and it was very similar in style to the residential portions of Bangalore Palace. There are central courtyards open to the air that rooms are located around, and currently those courtyards are used to showcase objects of interest. There were palanquins that women would be transported in, as well as some musical instruments and weaponry.
After lunch we went to an open market, where we got escorted to an oil shop by a random guy and shown the process of making incense by hand. We also stopped briefly at St. Philomena’s church, a simple but elegant church in the middle of the city.
Finally, we went to Brindavan Gardens. We had previously been to Lalbagh Gardens in Bangalore, and Brindavan was just as nice but in a slightly different way. Lalbagh is large, with a large lake surrounded by trees. There are wild monkeys that live there, and there are a lot of plants. It is maintained, but in a scrubby fashion, so the grass is largely dirt and it’s long. It’s the method they seem to use on a lot of parks here. Keep the green space but mostly let it do what it wants to do, without manicuring it. Brindavan was manicured. It has little fountains and streams of water running throughout it. It’s built to the side of a dam, so it has a small marshy lake on one side. There are less plants, but the flowerbeds that do exist are nicely arranged and not scraggly. It’s also located on hilly terrain, so the center is low, with each end rising in tiers. There was also a fountain show that we watched once the sun set, where fountains are synchronised to music and lit up with different colours.
Photo: Brindavan Gardens
The trip certainly ended up being worth it, even though the detour to the gardens meant that we didn’t get back to Bangalore until 11:30pm. The whole thing cost us, including entrance fees, around $150 Canadian. Plus we got to split that between the three of us. Not bad for a solid 16 hours with a car and driver.
As I write this, I am looking out a window from my workspace at an empty, garbage-filled lot with a cow munching on who knows what. It is my last week in Bangalore, before a 10-day whirlwind tour of some other parts of India. The Mysore trip was only one memory of hundreds that I have made in my ten weeks here. This trip, which started out as an intimidating way for me to force myself to test my limits and grow as a person, has become a genuinely fantastic experience that I have enjoyed immensely. I never thought I would go to India. Between the crowds, the crazy traffic, the heat and the pollution, it sounded like a place that I would hate. Yet underneath its problems and oddities, India is a beautiful place. I am so glad that I came, and I will carry this adventure with me for many years to come.
