Bangalore, Mysore and beyond....

Bangalore

We spent about 14 hours on an overnight bus and actually slept pretty well! We the found a hotel and went to explore the botanical gardens thinking it would be a nice way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon - ha ha! Turned out it was the final day of a rather big flower festival so it was heaving with people! Still we saw some beautiful flowers, a glass house modeled on Crystal Palace and sat down and had an ice cream on a 3 billion year old rock! We have taken in other local sights like markets, parks, aquarium and an art gallery. Eating has also been quite a big feature of our visit! one of the best places was a restaurant where we were served the food on a banana leaf! On our final evening we met up with the lovely Butler family and the friends they were staying with. We had a great time catching up and comparing stories of India.

Mysore

We headed out to Mysore which is about 3 hours from Bangalore. We thought we had booked a simple straightforward bus journey (then we remembered we were in India!) and it turned out to be a tour! So we stopped at various places a long the way which included a Hindu temple and a Catholic Cathedral. We arrived in Mysore about 5 hours later! We found ourselves a very nice hotel which had a rooftop restaurant and it even had hot water shower - luxury. We really enjoyed Mysore, a much smaller place than Bangalore but quite touristy. Highlights included going to the largest Zoo in India which was fantastic. It had a white tiger, lions and the only gorilla in the country. Best off all the animals were all really well cared for and had nice big cages. The following day we went for a walk which involved climbing up 1000 plus steps to the top of a hill to see a temple. A really great walk, especially seeing all the monkeys roaming around. On the final day we went to see the Maharajah's Palace. It really was beautiful - the only down side was having to pay 10 times more to get in because we were foreigners!

And on to Hyderabad

The next leg of our journey took us to Hyderabad. Unfortunately due to state rules we were unable to travel on a sleeper bus which meant we had to spend about 16 hours on a normal bus with reclining seats. Didn't seem too bad of an idea at the time but we soon discovered that we didn't have the best driver (far from it) and the roads from Mysore had more pot holes and speed bumps than we anticipated. So it was far from a comfortable night. We ended up in Hyderabad with various bumps and bruises but glad to have made it in one piece!