Sunday 23 June 2013

mysore

We left Varkala and headed north again, this time inland. We were on our way to a little town called Hampi but were stopping for 2 nights in Mysore to break up the journey.
Mysore is a noisy Indian city, famous for silk, aromatherapy and incense so of course every single person that struck up a conversation with us was selling one of these products. We even ended up at one man's house/shop smelling incense and oil (after he led us around for 1/2 an hour) and could only make our escape when the man noticed a policeman outside and became oddly nervous and distracted. A good time to take our leave I thought.

The highlights of Mysore were a pub that we walked for 1/2 an hour to find that had meat and beer- really a luxury after being in India for so long- and where we saw girls smoking, drinking beer and generally looking like they weren't confined by archaic Indian ideas. So that was nice. We also wandered through a market that was just an explosion of colour in the form of flower garlands, huge mounds of spices and coloured powder and whatever else Indian households might need. We sat in a central square and watched all the people...we saw a (probably drunk) man asleep against a light post, harming nobody, being rudely awaken by a policeman throwing water in his face and hitting him with a huge stick. Horrible, but if you are ever bored in India it must be because you have a bag on your head- there is always, always something to see. Good or bad. Or just odd.

We stayed in the worst youth hostel I have ever been to in Mysore. It's list of rules numbered at least 20 and included things like 'no music, no merrymaking, no whistling, no drinking, lights off at 11...'. You get the idea. It wasn't so much a youth hostel as a prison- there was even a warden (apparently but I never saw them).

After drinking lots of coffee and tea and eating heaps of idlis (little steamed rice cake things) and dosas we decided to leave Mysore but before we left we visited the train museum and had some fun climbing over all the old trains that were imported from England back in the day. We also found an old car...maybe an Austin?...anyway, it had been converted by a railway worker so that it could run on tracks and it used to take the inspectors on their rounds. That was super cool.

Then we got on the train, back to Bangalore station, to meet our connecting train to Hampi.

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