Travelers Honeymoon ~ Episode 13 ~ Organized Tours... Never Again!

In the last episode I left you with a bunch of monkeys, as we were making our way up the from Kerala to find a little western familiarity in Goa. We wanted the kind of music and party we were used to, the type of music we danced to while we fell in love in that desert, north of Reno where all kinds of humans express their wildest selves in a week of great debauchery and freedom of art!

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The next place on the map we thought would be good to see was a city called Mysore. We picked a super easy hotel right by the bus station without the hassle of anyone trying their best to find us the right place to stay! It felt a little high end but it really wasn't a pricey room.

A lot to see in Mysore:

• Devaraja Market

After settling in we thought it would be fun to go to Devaraja Market. We had plenty of time and it was relatively easy to get to. This was a very large and colorful place where every merchant organized whatever they were selling with intense care and beauty. There were bright spices, dried peppers and fruit, perfume bottles that looked like they were from a different century and smells of paradise to lure you in, flowers everywhere arranged to please the eye, sweets, silks, and really anything you need. Some shop owners would make piles of fruits and vegetables that defied gravity... Not really surprising in India, as everything is different here, yes even gravity (well it just kind of feels like it)!

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How incredible are all these colors?

Of course it's super crowded, but than again aside from our excursion to the Andaman Islands I haven't seen too many places in India that weren't very crowded! And of course, the cows... I love them, they are everywhere, and this one here actually looks pretty well fed!

• Sri Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens

Jess thought it would be fun to go to a zoo... Not usually my favorite thing to do, but we were in a big city and we had to play tourist! Not really, I do like to see animals and I wanted to see how they seemed to be treated. Of course it was really cool, it always is but it is sad to see them all locked up like that just for our viewing pleasures!

The funnest part of the Zoo were the signs. They got a little ridiculous, but it's mostly the drawings I thought were amusing. I find the English used in India just awesome. Back some 20 years ago when I went to India for the first time, I brought a sitar home with a small book to learn with. I loved the sentence structure that was used to describe sounds or finger positions. And while you're there you can see this just about all over the place:

So don't sit on the railing, you could fall in the tiger pit where the tigers will try to eat you and than if you come out alive, it looks like you will be escorted by park security seemingly with punishment. I really enjoyed those signs. They aren't wrong at all, these poor animals in there will probably eat you if you fall in!

Oh no... I was right, here's an English version of the same sign for the rhino pit, you do get punished!!! That would be a really rough day for anyone falling in there!

Here are some more signs I found great:

I know a lot of people that will love this one... for me God is Mother Earth and the Universe and all that so I absolutely love this sign.

A little rhyming never hurt anyone! Let's say it together, go ahead say it out loud while you're reading, it feels good!

I'm not really sure how to interpret this one... And by the way sorry about these photos, I had to blow them up a little to fit into the steem format!

Haha yes, Coconuts are refreshing!!!

Best do the rest of Mysore with an organized tour:

The afternoon after the zoo, we decided to book a guided tour of the city. We thought that for once, why not splurge on doing something easy, something where we get led to and from all the different important sites there are to see. Booking a tour was relatively easy as there are booking agents everywhere, especially near the bus station where we had our hotel! After a little bit of shopping around for the best price, we realized they were all, more or less the same.

The tour must have started super early, there were quite a few places and one of them was slightly out of town. What I didn't know or expect, was that we were going to be pushed around and rushed through every site like cattle! The guides were intense, and insisted we go through the entirety of each site, but wanted us back on the bus way too fast.

• Srikanteshwara Temple

This is a very pretty place up on a hill on the edge of town where there is a great big view of the valley below. It was busy with all the shops related to the temple, selling anything from offerings to lovely Indian sweets, food and drinks.

To really experience life around an Indian temple you have to just go, it's a bit hard to explain... there are smells of coconut oil and broken coconut shells, flowers, incense and the frying of all kinds of foods... the sounds are incredible too, but that is almost familiar everywhere it is heavily populated in India. The chatter, and bells, the chanting, the music, all the laughter and shouting of people hustling and the horns from rickshaws and buses. Let's not forget the chai wallas making sure everyone know their chai is ready!

The place filled up with tour buses, jeeps and other vehicles very quickly, more and more people were crowding this beautiful area and its temple and that's part of what makes this country magic!

The arrangement is so bright and pretty... And these tough women spending all day hustling in the sun for only just a few bucks, I imagine. They looked happy.

• Maharajah's Palace (Amba Vilas)

Be back in 20 minutes they said.. No I'm only jocking, but I don't think we had much time on our own as we had to follow a guided group tour through the palace (not really our usual style to obey these kind of rules). We did however have about twenty minutes to roam around the grounds after the tour.

The palace is definitely worth a look through. It was so pretty with detailed works or art and carvings everywhere you looked. I didn't take many photos, and I'm not sure why because it was the kind of place where one could take hundreds of pictures. I vaguely seem to remember that we weren't allowed to take photos inside the palace, we might even have had to leave cameras behind before entering the palace!

You can see the majestic entrance is incredible all on it's own. Even the grounds were manicured beyond belief. And yet this is it, all I took were these three photos!

• St. Philomena's Cathedral

Shortly after going to a museum we weren't into all that much we had lunch somewhere insignificant, as we had to rush to get on with the rest of the tour. Sometimes things can actually be boring, yes in India too! We then headed to Saint Philomena's Church.

We didn't go into the church, we were already getting sick of the tour and frankly not very interested in a seeing a cathedral... Perhaps it was a mistake, they're usually quite beautiful inside as much as out. But here's a quick synapses from wikipedia:

A Catholic church that is the cathedral of the Diocese of Mysore, India. The full name is the Cathedral of St. Joseph and St. Philomena. It is also known as St. Joseph's Cathedral. It was constructed in 1936 using a Neo Gothic style and its architecture was inspired by the Cologne Cathedral in Germany. This is one of the tallest churches in Asia. source

• Brindavan Garden

And finally, a light at the end of the tunnel! We were on the last leg of an exhausting overcrowded bus ride... to the gardens! And it was quite a relief from the speedy tour. Here we had until after sun down. We could relax in the grass, walk around, eat ice cream and when night came there was a fun light show in the fountains!

Again for some reason we didn't take many photos, we were tired I guess and really mostly thinking of going back to the hotel 😊!

Looking back at this post, going through edits and things... I can see how much excitement my writing is reflecting our time on an organized tour! That was my first time doing something like it and I can see how some people may like this kind of thing. I guess traveling is for every walks of life hence why these tours exist. Personally not my thing...

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