Our first port of call on our tour of Southern India is Bangalore, a good starting point for our journey which will take in Belur, Mysore, Udhagamandalam (known as Ooty) for the Nilgiri Hills toy train, Wayanard Animal Sanctuary (for a dawn Safari), Kochi and a slow boat ride along the backwaters, Kovalam to see the confluence of 3 seas, Kanyakumari for more temples, Madurai City, Thanjavur (for more palaces and temples), Pudicherry and finally a week on the beach at Mahabalipuram before flying home via Chennai and Bangalore. All of this will take us 34 days, Phew, so we may need a holiday to get over the holiday when we get back!
The guide books describe Bengaluru as being ‘a city of glass and concrete’ but with a ‘side order of Indian chaos’.
It is known locally as the garden city and indeed there are two very large parks, Cubbon Park (300 acres) and Lalhagh Botanical Gardens (240 acres).
A must see is Bangalore Palace built in 1887, supposedly inspired by Windsor Castle inside you can see Tudor and Gothic influences.
We weren’t allowed to take any photos inside the palace.
One of the few buildings left of historical significance in Bengaluru is Tipu’s Palace, it was once surrounded by high walls and forts but now surrounded by bustling traffic and hooting car horns.
It’s virtually all built of wood, huge teak tree trunks at least 3ft wide were hand carved and painted and now they look like stone columns, they hold up romantic looking Moorish style arches. The back of the building is an exact replica of the front.
The king would stand in this balcony and listen to requests from his people.
Tipu Sultan called this palace Rashk-e-Jannar (the Envy of Heaven). Much later, the British Commission used the palace as its office, which at least stopped it from totally falling into decay.
Our next visit was to Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, which were originally laid out in 1740. Within the 240 acres is a Glass House inspired by the Crystal Palace in London. We were lucky enough to be there for the annual flower show. The place was wall to wall plants.
There are 12,000 flower heads in this display and it’s changed twice during the peoid of the show. The little house behind is also made of flower heads.
We walked around the rest of the garden which looked almost bare in comparison to the flower filled glass house. But we did find beautiful trees which were hundreds of years old.
There’s also a lake with a man made waterfall which is switched on twice a day, we managed to get a look.