Day 106 to 114: Mysore to Chilika Lake

The city of Mysore was next on the list and once again we hired bicycles to get the most out of the place and to get the least out of the hassling rickshaw and taxi drivers. Mysore had a different feel to most of the other cities that we had visited, more like a large and relaxed town as opposed to a non-stop, hectic and racy metropolis and therefore riding around on our two-wheelers proved as easy as ever.

Bright and early on our first morning we visited the dominating Maharaja’s Palace which, from a distance, resembles Buckingham Palace as it has a similar shape and layout. However, after a closer inspection I decided that no Queen of England would allow her home to fall prey to damp walls and crumbling concrete in dire need of a whitewash. The palace was completed in 1912 for the twenty-fourth Maharaja of Karnataka on the site of the old wooden palace which had been destroyed by a fire in 1897 but it seems that since partition when, all over India, most of the properties of Indias Maharajas were handed over to the state Government, the royal palaces, holiday homes and gardens have fallen into decay.

During the time of the Empire, the Maharajas of India were kept sweet by the British in order to gain and keep a certain amount of rule over a state. Money, niceties and the honour of mingling amongst the finest of British aristocrats kept the Indian princes happy and the British in command. Each of the palaces usually stood upon vast tracts of green and untouched land teeming with wildlife but after the hunting-obsessed British introduced the sport to the Maharajas and they took it up with just as much (if not more) vigour, the once animal-filled grasses, green plains and jungles of India began to show little signs of life. Many of India’s species were disappearing fast and the old photographs displayed in the Mysore Palace gave us little reason to wonder why.

The Maharaja (usually stood in the centre of the picture) would be dresssed in the most ridiculously fancy and pompous hunting outfit (which appeared to be stifling him from his toes upwards) with three or four little men to his right and another three or four little men to his left. I say ‘little’ men because standing next to this Maharaja, the last ruling prince of Kartanaka, that is what they were. He was massive. Absolutely mammoth in size. The tell-tale signs of him becoming such a whale were even apparent in the childhood photographs; with a rippling belly, jowly chin, greedy eyes and an ever-giving and doting mother lovingly standing by his side- he was set to be a big boy. Anything that little prince wanted, he got. And he (along with most of the Indian princes) wanted to hunt. Infront of the line of men, splayed out on the ground were (in some photographs) upto 200 tiger carcasses piled high like mini, striped mountains. All from one days hunting. It wasn’t uncommon for a ruler to notch up a disgusting tally of 4,000 birds in one day either; the bigger the pile, the bigger the prince’s fat head. Photographs of a days catch, stuffed animals and mounted tusks, horns, antlers and teeth covered the many walls in the many rooms of the palace and gave us no doubt as to the fact that this Prince really liked his ‘sport’. Of course hunting is not only to blame for the depletion of many Indian species, more recently poaching and the increase of human population in rural districts have greatly added to the problem but the trigger-happy British and Maharajas certainly played their part. They completely eradicated the Indian cheetah and brought the Asiatic lion to the brink of extinction. Only recently, off the back of the lions decline, a Maharaja in one of the northern states (as if to redeem himself) turned his land into a conservation park for the animal. It’s still teetering on the edge but numbers are slowly rising. Elephants, rhinos, snow leopards, swamp deer, spotted deer, musk deer, barking deer, the Himalayan hog deer, the Kashmir stag and the wild Ass of the Rann of Kutch are all living on the edge but don’t worry, if they do disappear from this land forever you can always visit one of the royal palaces to see a stuffed one. But the saddest story of all has to be that of the tiger. Maybe it’s because of the mystery surrounding the tiger, the fear, the respect, the myths or the adoration that commands such universal fascination, but few other animals seem to hold such power over man and as a Maharaja, bagging yourself a few hundred deer with the odd cheetah thrown in bares no comparison to tiger hunting; the “sport of kings”. As recently as the turn of the last century, up to 100,000 tigers still roamed wild around India but after decades of hunting, poaching (a whole tiger can fetch up to $100,000 on the black market) and forest clearing for farming- depriving the large carnivores of their main source of game and the cover they need to hunt- the numbers have dropped dramatically to around 1,000. Experts today claim that at the current rate of depletion, India’s most exotic animal could be extinct by the end of the decade.

After a one-night-boozey-stop-off in Bangalore our path took us to the old ruins of Hampi. This is the name of the main local village but the whole settlement spills out over twenty six square kilometres of surreal landscape littered with giant, golden-brown granite boulders and leafy banana fields; somewhat similar to a ‘Flintstones’ movie set. The weird rocks (some balanced in perilous arches, others heaped in colossal, hill-sized piles) are said to have been flung down by the armies of the age-old monkey kings (Bali and Sugriva) who ruled Hampi when time began. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, this was the most powerful Hindu capital in the land and travellers reported tales of markets full of silks and precious gems, beautiful bejewelled courtesans, ornate palaces and joyous festivities. However, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the wealthy and dazzling city was devestated by a six-month Muslim seige. Only stone and brick survived the attack so all that’s left to see now is monolithic deities, crumbling houses and an abundance of abandoned temples. What remains is simply extaordianary.

The ruins of Hampi transported us to another time in another world. Granted, the Muslim onslaught left the monuments in disappointingly poor shape, seemingly much older than their four or five- hundred years but the serene setting and the unbelievable vastness of the site; home to palaces, royal baths, public baths, elephant stables, pavilions, guardhouses, countless temples, and halls of justice, each intricately carved out of stone, left me feeling slightly bewitched. I couldn’t even begin to imagine this magical place in it’s hey-day; queens taking a dip in the royal baths, people worshipping the god’s in the spookily eerie underground temples, elephants housing the long and beautiful stables and kings parading around the palaces, looking down from their many towers on the magnificent and monumental Hampi. Walking around the site I felt like time had stopped. It really was one of the most unusual places we’d visited.