June 17-19, 2012

Kabini Lake and Mysore

After Bangarlore, we hired a driver to take us south and west to Kabini River Lodge which is situated between two national parks, Bandipur NP and Nagarhole NP.  Our main goal was to see elephants in the wild.  From everyones experiences and expectations this would be a given, a tiger would be icing on the cake.  

We had our first experience with rural India on the way to our lodge. When you "rent" a car in India it comes with a driver.  Although I'd rather have the freedom of being behind the wheel, people drive so aggressively it probably wouldn't end well.  After a wrong turn resulting in an hour and half detour, we arrived after about 7 hours on the road.  We didn't mind the wrong turn too much because we got to see a glimpse of rural life in India.

We quickly got used to sharing the road with herders and their goats or cows.

You can find women doing their daily wash along most easily accessible river banks.

Although expensive, our lodge offered the only way of gaining access into the wildflife sanctuary to hopefully see our elephants.  We had an evening jeep safari and boat safari the next morning as part of our package.  Unfortunately, the monsoon decided to start and it was raining during both of our safaris.  We sadly didn't see any wild elephants who must have been wisely hanging out under the protection of the jungle canopy instead of out in the open.  We did however sort of see a TIGER!  It was laying in bushes about 50 meters from the road and looking out at us.  Skip was able to get a picture with his super lens.  The following pictures are from our two safaris.

TIGER!

This was one of the friendly monkey monkeys (Langurs) that hung around the lodge's cafeteria.

Another National Park sign to add to our bulletin board at home!

We sat and watched this blue bird for about 10 minutes hoping it would fly off and give us a better shot.  It didn't, but these were beautiful non the less.

We saw a lot of gaur, Indian buffalo.  Big beautiful beasts, although you always seem to be hoping that a tiger will jump out of the bushes to attack.

Cara and Skip with his mega lense before our boat safari.

Traditional Indian fishing boat.  It was raining pretty hard, so one guy would paddle while the other would toss the net and then bail water.

One of the many awesome birds we saw.

Our driver picked us up after the boat safari and headed to Mysore for our last day of sightseeing together. 

Cows are everywhere in most cities.  This one was eating the floral hood ornament off this car.  Everything is free game for the cows.

The temple in front of Mysore Palace.  The detail in the stone carvings of these temples is amazing.

Mysore is known for its extravagent palace as shown behind us.  This picture doesn't do it justice but it will have to do since you are not allowed to take pictures inside.

Three Tigers!

This dye is used by the Hindus for worship at their temples.  From what I understand the different colors are for different gods and/or occassions. 

The morning following Skip's departure, Cara and I found our workout by running up the 1,001 steps of Chamundi Hill to the Sri Chamundeswari Temple.  Here I am on step 1.

At the temple, we found Hindi believers smashing coconuts in this designated coconut smashing pit.  Pretty awesome!  This was our first time to see this practice, but we later saw it in Hampi.

Cara in front of the temple after completing our first climb to the top.

Sri Chamundeswari Temple

Monkey monkeys haging out on someones house. These guys pretty much do what they want.

On our way up we passed several women who were marking each step on the way to the temple with a yellow and red mark with two fingers.  They were very meticulous.

After finishing our second trip up and down the temple stairs we took an auto rickshaw back into town.