Mysore 5:30 AM, the path to the Chamundi Hills from the base is so beautiful, covered with the arches made out of branches of the giant old trees and dotted with the colorful flowers seemingly crowning the old guards. The ride up top never left us out of sight from the breathtaking views of the city which hosts one of the stunningly extravagant Dussehra festival.
The holy hills treated us with a glorious returning march of the sun, freezing us at a place for an hour. The city is situated in the Northern-Western side of the hills and that too is a view to long for. The whole city looks magnificent covered with the morning fog.
By the time the Sun came to its full glory, our stomachs started to play the music of the hunger. We headed to GTR to satiate that growling beast, a 60 year old south Indian breakfast place with a retro feel located on the Narayan Shastri road. The hungry lords were more than satisfied after eating the delicious Upma, Idlis and Masale Dose. A must try. We had some more time left before we had the leave for Bandipur so we strolled around the city enjoying the morning breeze.
At 11:00 AM, we left for Bandipur while imagining all sorts of encounters we may have with wildlife in the national park, especially the big cats like tigers and leopards. We reached Bandipur after two hours of bus ride from Mysore.
We had booked our safari online at http://junglelodges.com, an Eco tourism venture by Govt. Of Karnataka. It costed ~8.5 ok for one person which included forest entry fee, awesome food and charming accommodation.
After feasting on the awesome lunch served by the kitchen staff of the lodge and then started for my first ever jungle safari around ~3:30 PM.
Day 1 at Bandipur, I was dreaming about getting the glimpses of a lot of tigers and I still have that dream after the end of day 1. The Bandipur forest is dry dedicious forest and during this time of the year i.e. March, most of the forest looks golden brown with the beautiful Taremara and yellow shower trees lurking here and there. The sighting of the wildlife is somewhat rare. The elephants have already migrated to the Kabini river forest and those lazyass tigers are in no mood to show up. Although we managed to see a lot of other members of the jungle community and 10s of unknown to me species of birds.
I still hope to see one of those Bengali beauties on day 2.
More photos from Day 1
Picture Credits: Sukhpreet Singh and Saurabh
Thank you Saurabh II for lending the camera.
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