indiadventures: TRAVELWEEK pt III: Mysore & Safari

Conveniently, this will be a short post. The next three weeks are essentially non-stop paper writing for me and I'm fairly unhappy about it, but luckily, of the next four weekends, it's looking like I'll be spending one in the quaint beach town of Gokarna and two in Goa (!!!), one for a film festival and the other for a final weekend of shenanigans on the beach before leaving the south (sad). It's hard to believe I've got less than five weeks left in Manipal, but this small town is starting to feel a little bit suffocating, so I can't say I'm terribly upset about that. India is an incredible place and there's so much more I want to see, so I'll be sad to leave, but Manipal, itself, has truly made me appreciate going to school in a real city.

OK so once we returned to Bangalore on an overnight train that proved quite sleepless for most of us, we made a zombie-like transfer to a bus that took us to Mysore where we would celebrate Dasara. The first day there we visited a summer palace (also belonging to Tipu Sultan), a cathedral and a temple. The temple, with its beautiful location on a hill overlooking the whole city, was excssively busy with everyone trying to squeeze in some last minute pujas for the holiday. There's a funny system that allows people to pay extra money in order to wait in a shorter line to go inside. The luckiest can pay 500 and wait just a few minutes, while others will pay 20 for a slightly longer line, but those who choose the free line end up waiting for about an hour. In my opinion, you haven't truly experienced India until you've been inside a temple being pushed out of line, shoved, budged and sometimes accidentally groped by over-eager devotees making their way to the idol. That night we went to check out the famous palace in Mysore known for its stunning lights (which really made me wonder about the blackouts and energy concerns in India). It was utter chaos, too, as Mysore is apparently home to one of the most highly-attended Dasara festivals.


hotel view

puja thief monkey

The next morning we woke up to make our way to the parade, a ride that would normally take about ten minutes, but thanks to traffic took over an hour. We were almost two hours early, so we sat and people watched until the parade began. Dasara is a holiday celebraitng the death of ravana at the hands of Ram and the defeat of good over evil. However, due to the blending of traditions from all sorts of Indian holidays and festivals, the Dasara parade seemed to be celebrating a general survey of Indian culture. There were brightly decorated elephants, sitar floats, "tribal" dance groups, Karnatakan flags, floats of famous actors and, of course, our favorite father of the constitution, Dr. Ambedkar.

Due to heat & exhaustion we left just before the end of the festivities in order to (hopefully) beat the traffic and make it to our next stop, the Kabini River Lodge, in decent time. Unfortunately some wrong turns were taken, and the "3-4 hour drive" turned into a "7-8 hour drive." We arrived at Kabini after the long and bumpy ride just in time to watch the end of a terribly depressing envirnmental documentary about dying elephants and go to sleep, as we had to wake up for our 6am safari! I'm not really a morning person, but being promised coffee and biscuits in a charming lodge before departing, I was pumped. The river lodge is actually a really cool place, it's part of this whole eco-tourism situation in India which helps fund the protection of these big wildlife reserves, while keeping them minimally abused by human interaction. There is definitely controversy surrounding the blocking off of wildlife preserves here, though, as it often means telling certain tribes that they must vacate their land. It was an exceptionally foggy morning, unfortunately, so animals were hard to spot. We saw a whole lot of white-tailed deer, as if I don't see any of those in Minnesota, a boar (hi john locke), some elephants (!!) and sadly, no tigers. After the drive around the jungle, we returned for a delicious buffet breakfast feast. After reading by the river for a while, we set out for our last stop of travel week, Ooty.