ok, here's the real scoop..

SO. Christoph and I returned from our Karnataka trip a couple days ago, completely exhausted (which is the right way to return from that kind of trip).

How it went was:

Monday, the 17th: we left that night on a night train, Vishaka's dad took us to the station and walked us all the way to our car. We weren't expecting that at all and felt like it was a bit of overkill until we were there.. it turns out that the local train we had to take to get us to the main train station does not have any station announcements and the stations themselves don't have signs, either, so we would've been lost. Mr. Rajaram said that he used to take that train for 20 years, so he calmly stood there in the crowded train with his hands in his pockets while we were tossed around for about an hour, trying to grab onto the posts or whatever we could to keep it so we weren't falling on the massive amount of other people. He said that he knew all the stops by how the tracks under us sounded, and that "you get used to knowing when to get off just from that."

So we were glad he was there to see us off. Also because on the door of our car (sleeper class) it had our names listed as "KEETH" and "TRIS TOPHOL" - which would've been concerning if he didn't explain that the names are basically meaningless for your ticket / seat reservation. Here's what a sleeper car inside looks like:



and



...

So then we got to Mysore in the morning, after waking up about a couple hours before and watching the sunrise and all the mesmerizing farmers fields. It was a very nice view, except that every few minutes or so you could see somebody pooping. Seriously. We think that the workers in the fields wait for the train to go by to start their morning poops.

But in any case, the fields of sugarcane and rice and tons of things we didn't know were all very pretty and neat to see. All of them seemed to have dozens of workers in them at the crack of dawn.. No machines in sight, but plenty of grass-and-reed-houses. I don't have much in the way of pictures from this time because I left my camera in the safety of its bag, and then that bag in the safety of the larger backpack, as there were lots of people that were not riding with the train walking up and down the aisles at each stop. Granted, most of them were selling coffee or tea or something impossible to pronounce (that we never did figure out what it was), but still. Better safe than sorry. Christoph has some pictures though; he has a less conspicuous camera.

These coffee sellers would yell out as fast as possible COFFEECOFFEECOFFEECOFFEECOFFEECOFFEE (take a big breath) and repeat. Usually it would sound like "CopyCopyCopyCopy" etc, but the meaning was pretty clear. We never saw anybody buy from them, so we didn't either (even though it sounded like a great idea).

In Mysore we were met at the station by a guy whom I thought was supposed to be a cousin of Vishaka's mom, but it turned out to be an employee of this cousin, who only spoke a little english. I didn't figure out that he wasn't the cousin himself until a few hours later when we left him to go to Bandipur, our next destination. So that was a little embarassing.

He was a signal engineer at the train station, and let us hang out in the signal office, which looked like this:



and this is the outside:



that signal is just for show and it doesn't work. He told us that something like 4 times. It was a little weird.

What we were doing there was waiting for the tourism center to open, so we could get bus tickets. It opened after a couple hours (of us wandering around the station, waking up still) and they told us to just go to the bus station and ask there (which is probably what we would've done anyway...). It turned out that the bus station had a crazy "you just have to know it already" system in place, kinda like the local train before, so it actually took a lot of effort to figure out which of the 12 buses that were there was the one we wanted. (It also didn't help that 'Bandipur' sounded kinda like a few other places with our accents, I think.)

Bandipur, which I suppose I should explain is a large national park and tiger sanctuary, is not a town. We didn't know that until we got there. We just assumed that we could get an autorickshaw to the lodge we had booked, but we were mistaken. It turns out that the basic mode of transport there is jumping in the back of a government truck, which did after a while of watching monkeys and little kids chase each other.



as the kids were leaving

and



a pest!

and



This guy looks like he combs his hair more than I do...

So yeah. Then this was our room (actually its own little house in itself):



The lodge area was nice, and they kept us very well fed. The 2 nights we were there, we ended up going on 4 "jungle safaris" in the jeeps around in the woods, each a couple hours long of bouncing around on the worst roads in existence in some of the least-safe jeeps ever, but we didn't care. It was pretty awesome.



We saw tons of these spotted deer, as well as these wild elephants (in what seemed to turn into a full-speed run - that we felt bad about causing):



We also saw some other kinds of monkeys that would actually leap through the grass like deer in big bounds (one of those strange things you never see in a zoo):



this is what we looked like for the most part:



The morning we left looked pretty, and it stopped raining! (I didn't mention that, did I? well it was raining almost the whole time we were there.)







Nice, huh? We thought so. Look at the rest of my Karnataka album for a bunch of other pictures of animals and things from here.

Then we went back to Mysore, where we saw the palace (the palace there is supposedly only second to the Taj Mahal in India in terms of .. grandeur? size? importance? ..that point was never too clear to me, but it's nice:



This picture was taken moments before about 30 of these school kids swarmed me with friendly questions. Actually it was basically "what is your name?" and "from what country?" about 30 times. I got out of them that they were on a school trip from Bangalore, but when the group started to get uncontrollably large I said I had to go. I only went, you know, about 20 feet away, but they rejoined their teachers after that.

Here's that palace at night (apparently it was rebuilt in the early 20th century after a large fire, and nearly all parts of it are imported from europe, except the lighting and wiring which was from the US):



To the left in that picture is one of two important temples on the palace grounds, similarly lit.

********

The following day we took a 150 rupee tour of the area, which was excellent and lasted about 3 and a half hours. Keep in mind that 150 rupees is about $4.



This is on top of a big hill, one of the most important hills in Hindu mythology, apparently:







That last picture does not show just how large this statue is (which is also carved out of one single rock). It's large.

Then we got back to Chennai after a crazy train ride that was about 3 and a half hours late getting in, almost all of the extra time seeming like it was just minutes away from the final station, so that wasn't that great.

The last couple days we've just been doing things around Chennai again, only now we're not in such dramatic culture shock that we can't function. Still some, but less.