Mysore - Places to visit and Things to do

This Mysore trip is part of our Coorg trip. I will start from where I left off in earlier post which covered the first two days Coorg trip  - Coorg : Places to visit and Things to do.

Day 3 : Jaganmohan palace, Mysore Maharaja Palace, St. Philomena's church, Chammundi Hills, Chamundeshwari Temple, Brindavan Gardens

We checked out from Palm Era resorts in Coorg and started to Mysore around 9 AM. We decided to visit few places before checking in to hotel in Mysore. It took two hours to reach Mysore and we reached Jaganmohan palace by 11.

Timings : 10 AM to 5.30 PM
Ticket : Rs.20 per person

Jaganmohan palce has Jayachamarajendra art museum inside, which hosts Ravi Varma paintings among many others. It was great to see the originals for the first time.

Jaganmohan Palace

From Jaganmohan palace, we went to Mysore Maharaja palace. We totally underestimated the amount of time we will spend there. It takes 2+ hours to cover everything even if you hurry. It's very huge and has lot of other monuments within. We took tickets and entered the palace.

Timings : 10 AM to 5.30 PM
Ticket : Rs.40 per person

Within the palace, you can see the royal Darbars, antique furniture,lot of beautiful pillars and of course amazing art and carvings on ceiling.

Mysore Palace

Mysore Palace View

Mysore Palace Side view

Mysore Palace Public Darbar

Mysore Palace Interior

Mysore Palace Royal Darbar

Mysore Palace Monuments

Both Jaganmohan and Maharaja palaces have a lot of Wadiyar Kings heritage.

We took a break to have lunch, where I had Bonda - thinking that it's the famous Mysore bonda/bajji - only to realize that it's just a solid spherical vada :-/

We started off again with St.Phelomena's Church. It looks as if it came straight out of the Victorian era. Nothing much inside except for a long tunnel with plaques of donators' names.

St. Phelomena's Church

St. Phelomena

After this, we checked into our hotel Rio Meredian which is in the core of the Mysore city. Almost every tourism place was nearby. Room was good with basic amenities - tea/coffee, kettle, soap, lotion, shampoo etc.

Nataraj at Rio Meredian

We resumed our exploring with Chamundi Hills. You can see almost the entire city from the Hills. We took special darshan(Rs. 30) at Chamundeshwari Temple to skip very long queues. It didn't take too much time and we even managed to buy laddu prasadam.

Chamundeswari temple

Mahishasura Statue

While coming down from the Chamunid Hills, we got down at a view point which had these binoculars(Rs.20 to view for about 2-3 minute view).

View from Chamundi Hills

We then went to Brindavan gardens which is little far away compared to other places from the core of Mysore city. There's a lot of street food outside the gardens.

Brindavan Gardens

Ticket: Rs.15 + extra charge for Camera.
Timings: 6.30 AM to 9 PM.

It's full of greenery and fountains. There's a dam with Goddess Kaveri statue in the middle of Kaveri water. We expected a lot from the famous Brindavan Garden light/laser show as we have heard a lot about it. But if you have watched the light/laser show in Hyderabad's Lumbini Gardens, then this will seem very basic. It may have been a great visual when it started in past, but right now it still stays the same old. Light show happens at 6 PM and the crowd rush to it by crossing a bridge or taking a boat ride.

Kaveri River

Light show

I took some weird photos of the light show. We were damn tired after this and it was 9 PM by the time we reached the core city. We wanted to try the actual Mysore bonda/bajji somehow, but most of the restaurants were closed by then! Yeah, most of the shops, restaurants,etc get closed very early in Mysore and the roads are almost empty by 9 PM. We finally found a restaurant open after lot of search and had dinner.

This was our first hectic day in Mysore! Strangely Mysore had better weather than Coorg. It wasn't too sunny and it was always breezy.

Day 4: Mysore Zoo

Next day, we had breakfast(buffet included in package) at Rio Meredian which had lot of variety and a better black coffee than Coorg's.

We decided to visit Mysore Zoo and then head off to Srirangapatnam.

Ticket: Rs.50
Timings: 8.30 AM to 5.30 PM

The zoo was spread over a stretch of 3KMs! We had to hurry and walk all the way to cover the entire zoo. It had lot of animal, bird and aquatic life including cheetah, leopard, lion, deer, rhino, hippo, birds, black swan, crocodile, giraffe, elephant, hyena, jackal, chimps, monkeys, jungle cats, snakes...and many more!! Phew! So this obviously takes 2+ hours if you run.

Animals at Zoo

We can even adopt an animal from the zoo. There were many people who adopted each animal and their names and their adopted animal names were on display at each spot. Among those thousands of names, my eye caught this name somehow- That's Humblefool! If you don't know who is Humblefool, you can read about him here on Quora. I double checked if I have seen the right name and confirmed after seeing his actual name.

Animal adoption

Humble Fool

After the zoo, we hurried to the hotel and checked out of it. Then we headed to Srirangapatnam. I will post about it in next week's post. Overall, we loved Mysore as it was clean and had wide roads, less traffic, less noise, cool weather and lot of heritage.



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