india travel diary 2007 to 2008

Day 47, Mysore [Saturday 19th January 2008]

Previous day: Day 46, Mysore [Friday 18th January 2008]

Next day: Day 48, Mysore [Sunday 20th January 2008]

We have to move hotels as ours is all booked up for the weekend - I read in The Times of India that Mysore is the second most visited place in India after the Taj Mahal.

After lugging our bags a few doors down the road, and taking a look around the new place, we go back to our old place for breakfast! They have something on the menu called Chow chow bath, which is a tasty, filling breakfast made up of two bowls of pudding - one sweet and one spicy and savoury. It's served with coconut chutney, and the mix of all the flavours is amazing, especially first thing in the morning. You can also get the two dishes seperately, as kesari bath (sweet) and upma (savoury), but you'd be missing out.

When they serve you coffee here you can have Nescafe or Indian coffee. When it comes it arrives in a small steel tumbler, which itself sits inside a wider, shallower steel tumbler. The inner tumbler is full to overflowing with coffee, often having dribbled some excess into the outer tumbler. The setup is reminiscent of getting sake served to you, which comes as a glass inside a wooden box, and where the overflowing excess is a sign of the hosts generosity. Before you drink your coffee, we learn through observing other people, you add as much sugar as you require - normally 4 to 5 spoonfuls - then pour the coffee between the two receptacles in great steaming arcs of liquid. Repeat this until the sugar is dissolved and the coffee has cooled down enough for you to drink it from either steel tumbler in loud slurps. Follow this with a mitha paan (sweet paan) from the vendor outside your hotel or restaurant and you have the perfect end to your breakfast.


We get the bus to the top of Chamundi Hill, where there is a temple to the goddess Chamundi from whom the hill gets its name, a hilarious museum, a big pirate and, halfway down the 1000 steps carved into the rock, a huge monolithic Nandi bull. The bull is blackened with coconut oil and adorned with flowers. We meet a couple from Mumbai here, and take photos of each other.

Further on down the hill there's a grey old guy sitting on a wall, a newspaper laid out next to him piled with cucumbers and pineapples. He peels and slices the cucumber into long batons, and does the same with the pineapple, then wraps the lot up in a sheet of newspaper and hands it over. Juicy, sweet and refreshing on a hot walk down a hill, all for Rs. 30.

We go to Mysore Zoo next. Built in 1882, it's a quaint mix of retro naivety like formal rows of small, artfully stylized aviaries and modern naturalistic environments where elephants, giraffes and monkeys roam relatively freely in natural habitats. It's clean and tidy and the animals seem mostly happy, with the exception of some of the big cats who are pacing restlessly and relentlessly. It's large and well kept and we easily spend an enjoyable couple of hours here.

In the evening we visit St Philomena's Church which is also, confusingly, called St Joseph's Cathedral. It has a soaring, Gothic spire and is as tall as it is long (165ft). It looks handsome in solid grey stone. Inside it is pristine white, and fll of people as a Mass is in progress. The sign says they say Mass in English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada. The congregation sings sweetly as Kate lights some candles.

We spend an hour or two shopping in the silk shops and endless garment stores. Vendors pull out innumerable rolls of cotton and silk. They pluck packets of readymade salwaar kameez, all the time asking you questions about colour, or style, or length.

Everything they pull out for display is different, every request has to be made relative to what is already on the tble in front of you, a constant narrowing of the query and the search. It seems the best thing to do might be to buy a length of good material and get it tailored into a fitted suit - the tailors' turnaround time is usually a day or two and the price is reasonable. The material might cost Rs. 600 for cotton, and the tailoring another Rs. 150.

We finish the day with a couple of beers at our new hotel's rooftop restaurant. At one point the waiter asks us to hide the bottle because he's told a group of 14 strict Muslims who are about to sit nearby that no alcohol is served in the restaurant.

I watch the Newcastle - Bolton match on Star Sports, following the momentous news that Kevin Keegan is back in charge at Newcastle. They draw 0-0.

Next day: Day 48, Mysore [Sunday 20th January 2008]

Previous day: Day 46, Mysore [Friday 18th January 2008]