This was an Anand guided trip. He picked me up from home at 5:45 am
(to avoid "full traffic" again), and we picked up Katerina and
Alexandra from their hotel at 6.

The first stop was to see the giant banyan tree at Ramonalli. Anand
claimed that it was 1000 years old (although my guidebook said that it
wsa only 400), and it was quite impressive, looking more like a small
forest due to all the secondary trunks than a single tree.

I was sitting in the front seat of the car, so I engaged in
photographing the road, to put together my "things you see on the
roads in India" series. I got lots of ox carts, quarry trucks being
used as school busses (with kids sitting on top of the rocks),
ridiculously overloaded bicycles, and of course lots of wandering
cows.

We stopped brifly at Tipu Sultan's dungeon, where he used to imprison
British generals before they killed him, and got our first taste of
annoying tourist touts. They were trying to sell us sandalwood boxes,
which were of course fake, but amusingly smelled more strongly of
sandal oil than the real sandalwood. Anand yelled at them a little,
but they were presistent, so we fled back to the car.

Next stop was at Gumbaz mosque, which contains the graves of Tipu
Sultan, his father Hyder Ali, and his mother. Outside, there were some
people offering a horse ride, which Alexandra and Ketrina took. After
a while I got persuaded too. We clopped along a road for a while and
went back, where the horse owners asked for an outrageous amount of
money from me (and different from what he and Anand agreed on). Anand
told me to give them 120 rupees for both horses, which made them very
unhappy. One of the owners and Anand yelled at each other for a while,
and then we just walked away leaving them with their 120 rupees
(instead of 500 that they asked for originally).

From the mosque, it was a short drive to the Ranganthittu Bird
Sanctuary. It is a lake formed by a dam on the Kavery river, and it
home to lots of cormorants, egrets, spoonbills and storks. As we
entered the grounds, there was a big sing saying "Do not put your
hands in the water while boating." Looking at the small islands in the
lake, it became apparent why now, there was a marsh crocodile sunning
itself on one of the rocks. Now they usually eat fish, but I am sure
they would not mind an occasional tourist.

We took a 25 minute boat ride around the lake and admired the
birds. There definitely were lots of birds to see, along with more
crocodiles, and several trees comletely covered with sleeping fruit
bats. The bats were hanging upside down from the branches and looked
like weird black fruit.

After stopping for lunch at a veg restaurant, we finally got to Mysore
proper. At this point it was 1 pm. We spend 2 hours walking around the
palace, which is very beautiful, especially inside. Unfortunately you
are not allowed to take pictures of the inside rooms, which contain
beutiful wood carved and inlaid ivory doors and furniture, painted
floors, walls and ceilings, and in general look like something
straight out of Arabian nights. Interestingly, the palace it rather
new, it burned down in 1912 and was rebuilt by a British architect.
Coming back form the palace, we made a mistake to walk through the
little tourist trap market, which made us an instant target for
several touts. We nad to deal with them while waiting for Anand to
bring the car, and one of them even followed us as we were driving out
of the parking lot, shouting "50 rupees" into the window (he was
trying to sell some musical instrument made from coconut shell, and
the original price was around 300 rupees).

Our final stop was to visit the temple on Chowmundi hill. At this
point we were all pretty tired, and again there were lots of people
trying to sell us stuff, here it was garlands to take to the
temple. We managed to avoid all of them except the last one, who
cleverly pretended to be associated with the shoe minders, and just
gave us some flowers as we were taking off our shoes. When we came
back out, he demanded 50 rupees for his flowers, and we were too tired
to argue.

The temple itself does not look terribly different than the other
Chola temples we've seen, but it was interesting to watch people
getting various stuff blessed (food, flowers, and I think one guy was
getting his cellphone blessed, or maybe he was trying to use the
cellphone camera to take a picture of something else getting blessed).

Afterwards, it was around 4:30 pm and we headed back to Bangalore. The
timing was somewhat unfortunate, since we got stuck in traffic getting
into Bangalore, so the return trip took something like 4.5 hours.