Bangalore tour

Pete and I booked our driver Farook for a day of sightseeing around town on Sunday and managed to pretty much hit all the top tourist sights around town. As my wanderings have so far been confined to our Koramangala neighbourhood, it was nice to see some of the sights in the rest of this large city.


First up was the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens.


The gardens were very pleasant to walk through and had numerous exotic plants on view. According to the guidebook the gardens houses an extensive horticultural seeding centre.

Bangalore is known as "Garden City" and has a large number of parks and green spaces (a feature not common among major Indian cities). I quite enjoyed our walk through Lalbagh and hope to check out some of the other parks on offer in the city.

The picture above is one of the original city's original watch towers which was erected by Magadi Kempe Gowda a feudal chief. At the time (1537), he had thought the city limits would one day extend as far as where he had placed the watchtowers. Today this watchtower is within Lalbagh and the city stretches far beyond this point.

One of my favourite sights whenever I visit tropical areas are the flowers and I really enjoyed walking below these blooming trees in Lalbagh. I love Canada, but our flowers just never seem to be as vibrant in colour.

From Lalbagh we headed off to the Bull Temple, which is a 16th century temple housing a big bull statue.
Photos within temples are not allowed so the above is a photo of the top of the temple from the outside.

Vendors outside the temple sell flower garlands, coconuts and other offerings people can buy to offer the priest.

The temple also has a little park beside it where young lovers seem to congregate and steal a few embraces on park benches. That is until the decency police catches you. We watched an officer blow his whistle, point, yell, and shake his stick at a couple he thought were getting too 'fresh' for his liking. Bangalore is generally a relatively 'western' and modern place, so I'd hazard to guess that couples in other Indian cities have an even harder time stealing a kiss or two.

From the Bull Temple, we headed off to a fairly new Hari Krishna temple called the Iskcon temple. It is a large and lavish domed structure that is extremely well organized and run. Visitors file through its large hall and are blessed by some sort of priest as they perform a ceremony in front of the images of Krishna and Radha. The business side of things is immediately apparent on your way out as you have to walk through a gauntlet of vendors, food stalls, book sellers, and a religious movie hall, before you are allowed back out to the parking lot. The crowd on that day was crushing or I might have given in to some of the temptations on offer. The food especially looked pretty appetizing, although I suspect my stomach may have been more adventurous than Pete's. Unfortunately you're not allowed to take photos on the premises so I have none to post.

Next up on the agenda was Tipu's Summer Palace where I experienced my first 'firangi' surcharge.

And quite the surcharge it was at 1900% above the local price. This is apparently very common in India and there are often specifically set 'foreigner' prices for everything from museum fees to airline tickets. I don't begrudge the museums and government run tourist sights as much as the airline tickets and other goods and services. The Rs.100 amounts to little over CAD$2 so I shouldn't complain, but still it seems discriminatory to me. Try putting up a 'foreigner' price in Canada and see what happens.

Tipu's summer palace is a wooden two-story structure that was not much larger than most large homes in North America and was, frankly, somewhat of a disappointment for a 'palace'. Besides its small size, the painting decorations on its walls are unfortunately quite faded and a shadow of its former glory.



Tipu ruled Bangalore in the 18th century and opposed the British (till he was overthrown by them in 1799). Needless to say he had quite a dislike for the British and his prized possession was a little organ in the shape of a tiger mauling a British officer. The form of the organ is actually not that detailed but still it was quite an amusing item (no pictures were allowed) and one of the best parts of visiting the Tipu palace.

From Tipu palace we headed off to Bangalore palace which is the summer palace for the Mysore Maharaja. He apparently still lives somewhere on the premises but the palace itself is now just a tourist attraction. (They don't like you taking pictures of the outside and Pete had already taken pictures of the interior so I don't have any pictures to show here.)

An aged caretaker took us through the palace and basically repeatedly pointed out the following three things:

1. Beautiful chandeliers all imported from Belgium.
2. All wood items are hand carved out of teak wood. Very strong, very smooth.
3. This is not wall paper on the wall, it's all hand painted.

Needless to say, his commentary was not all that helpful in giving us a background on the place. As in the case of Tipu palace, I was somewhat saddened by the palace's state of disrepair. You could clearly see that at one point it was probably quite glorious, but the current Raja seems to not have invested the money needed to keep it up and most of the furniture is missing. You basically walk from one sad empty room to another sad empty room and wonder at what the place must have looked like.

The caretaker did say that they were undertaking a number of repairs and restorations, although I didn't see anyone at work or any evidence of work. I hope they do restore the place, it's a shame to have such a historical place fall into disrepair like that.

Our last sightseeing stop was the State Secretariat, Vidhana Soudha, which is the largest civic structure in the country. We didn't go inside but just took a few picture from the street.

After all that sightseeing, we headed off to Ebony restaurant on the 13th floor of a building in the Mahatma Gandhi (MG) road area for a late alfresco lunch while enjoying some lovely city views. A good end to a good day.

This coming weekend is a long weekend here and Pete has arranged for us to go to Kerala and experience the backwaters. It should be a great trip. Blog post and photos to come.