Mysore, Sravanabelagola, Halebid, and Belur

Hi everybody,

We left Munnar for Mysore after spending three nights in Munnar. The problem was that it took twelve hours traveling to get to Mysore so we broke the trip up into two days and spent the night in between at a fancy hotel in Coimbatore. In Mysore we went to tour the Maharaja’s palace (now it’s just a museum). It was amazingly over the top and impressive. The tour we took of it was pretty interesting. At night they light up the palace and its grounds with 96,200 lightbulbs and it is amazing to see. I got sick later that day and stayed mainly in bed the rest of our time in Mysore (I still have a cough).

After Mysore we caught a cab to Hassan. On the way we stopped at a town called Sravanabelagola. It is famous for having the world’s tallest monolithic statue, a naked Jain deity named Gomateshvara. It is amazing to see but to get to it we had to climb six hundred stone steps up a hill in the midday heat with only thin socks to protect our feet from the heat. It was such a terrible hike that after about thirty steps Colin felt so bad that he couldn’t go any further so we had to take turns staying at the bottom with Colin while the others went to the top. The statue was reeeaaally big and looked sort of Buddhist.

Hassan is a little town with not much to do. We used it as a base to go see the towns of Belur and Halebid. They both are home to huge 900 year old temples. They both are covered top to bottom in amazing carvings. (They are really well preserved and the worst damage is from a Muslim raid 700 years ago.) Every carving is different and portrays gods and scenes from Hindu mythology. In the Halebid temple we saw these two HUGE statues of Nandi the bull that were nine feet tall! They were both amazing (the temples not the cows). Today we left and caught a bus to Bangalore. It broke down in the middle and the bus filled with smoke so all the passengers had to get off and wait along the road for other passing buses to Bangalore. We’ve got three days left in India and we are spending them in Bangalore.

Goodbye!