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India

Magical Mysuru in 1 Day

Mysuru is a lovely city with cooler temperature, not so crowded and colonial era buildings all around (now used as government offices and educational buildings).

Since we had only a day in our hand, we decided to take a tour bus next day which was supposed to take us to all the tourist places including Sri Chamundeshwari Devi temple which was on Chamunda hills (13 kms from Mysuru city).

We soon realised taking a tour bus was probably not a wise decision as they covered all the sites however not necessarily giving enough time to explore them at our pace.

We also visited a town Srirangapatana which was Tipu Sultan’s capital near Mysuru. We were shown Tipu Sultan’s fort, where he was killed by British Army and his summer palace all in ruins now.

Chamundeshwari temple was very crowded and took almost three hours to get a darshan. The highlight of the tour day was a breathtaking Mysuru palace.

The Palace is built in the Indo-Saracenic style with a touch of Hindu, Mughal, Rajput, and Gothic architectural styles. The palace was built by Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV and was designed by the British architect Henry Irwin.

The grandiose of the palace and a beautiful architecture amazed everyone visiting this palace.  We bought tickets to visit inside the palace and the intricate designs on its pillars, ceilings and windows were feast to our eyes.

In the evening, we also took a horse carriages ride on the roads around the Mysuru palace which kids enjoyed thoroughly.

We also visited the Brindavan Gardens which is situated in Mandya district and spread in an area of 60 acres beside the Krishnarajasagar dam across the Kaveri River.

We arrived at the garden in twilight when all the evening lighting and the musical fountains were in action. Overall the Mysuru was a beautiful city and we created some lovely memories here.

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India

Kanyakumari

We took a train from Trivandrum to Kanyakumari but unfortunately the train was late and we arrived to Nagercoil (the train terminates at Nagercoil) by midnight.

We learned that Nagercoil was 17 Kms away from Kanyakumari so we decided to take an auto to Kanyakumari and arrived at our hotel by 2 am.

Luckily our hotel was at a walking distance from the Vivekanand Rock Memorial which is a popular tourist monument in Kanyakumari, India. The memorial was built in 1970 in honour of Swami Vivekananda who is said to have attained enlightenment on the rock.

According to local legends, it was on this rock that Goddess Kumari performed austerity. The memorial is not approachable through land and requires a 10 minutes ferry ride.

At this time, we were quite excited to touch the southernmost part of India however our happiness was soon dampened when we realized there was a very long queue to get to the ferry.

Since the weather was really hot, we decided to pay 4 times and take an express queue instead. Luckily, it only took 45 minutes to get to the ferry through the express line.

The ferries were overcrowded and rocked through waves and we arrived at the memorial. The Rock memorial is surrounded by the Indian Ocean,

Bay of Bengal and the Pacific Ocean and it was a great feeling to be there. The rock memorial has an art gallery as well on Swami Vivekanand life however we decided not to visit the art gallery as we were to catch a train to Bangalore from Nagercoil.

There is also a very tall statue nearby, the Thiruvalluvar Statue, or the Valluvar Statue – a 133-feet tall stone sculpture of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar.

We boarded the train from Nagercoil that evening and arrived to Bangalore the next morning after 14 hours of train journey. When we got off the train, we were treated by a comparatively cooler weather in Bangalore.

As I mentioned earlier, at Bangalore station we changed our mind and decided to go to Mysuru first (luckily we hadn’t booked a hotel in Bangalore). We took a train and arrived in Mysuru late afternoon.