What a Sunday!?

This time it was a casual question “what’s the weekend plan?” that turned out as a trip to Shriranagapattana(SR Pattana in short). U and myself were working on Saturday, which left only Sunday in our precious weekend. U was keen on going to SR Pattana to enquire her favorite deity. I joined her with the intention of covering a few places near by after the enquiry! After a debate we decided on 6:30 AM as our start time – very very early to be awake on a Sunday. We boarded a bus to Mysore at Majestic and set off to our destination. The ride on the Mysore road was amazing – the best companion that we had on that day was the weather – it was perfect for travel. After a quick breakfast at Mandya, we continued our journey. We felt that our bus was very slow as every other object on the road that was coming from the back zoomed ahead of us. It was almost three hours and we reminded the driver about our stop. After some time, the window at the back of the driver opened and he saw us – we decoded that as our call to get down.

The bus left us on a main road – we entered the SR Pattana bus stand and enquired about the temple. We got into a rick to traverse a distance of 1km to reach the temple. While traveling we also struck a good deal with the rick guy to go around places over there. Contented with our deal and the plan for the day, we entered an old temple that had a similar architecture of temples at Tamil Nadu. To our surprise, the crowd was manageable. It was an awesome sight to the see the smiling face of the Lord. We lost ourselves for a few minutes, got back and visited other deities around. After a couple of photo sessions in the Mandaps and with “Aannais” , we left the temple. Then we were off to discern the history of the place. It looked like Tipu Sultan had a lot of association with this place – we visted his Palace, Durgas, Masjid and Gumbaz. The museum had a very good collection of coins, ornaments, dresses and furniture that were used during 1700s.One observation made by U – all portraits and paintings of the lineal dynasty has been created by the white men. The expressions in the eyes of the Sultans were so real and sparkling! My friend liked the fifth son of Tipu as he was looking smart! After the stint in refreshing our minds with little history – we went to the next place “Triveni Sangam”. This place is the culmination of three rivers – our hunt for a place to sit and watch the river peacefully went in vain. I would only say that the beauty of the place has been defiled. We tried to capture the far away river in the camera, which quenched our thirst of drowning in the serenity of the place to a certain extent.

Our next stop was Ranganthittu – the bird sanctuary. According to the rick guy this was the right season to visit the place. So with the hope of spotting a variety of birds we went to the haven. There was a slight drizzle and it increased the splendor of the place. We took a boat ride in the river to get a close glimpse of the birds. We spotted Open beak Stork, Painted Stork, White Ivis and other brids whose names were not known to us. An astonishing thing is we could always spot a group of birds and we assumed them to be of same variety that turned wrong when we realized that one group actually has a variety of birds. We could see huge nests and some birds were fast asleep. My friend thanked me for the opportunity to exploit her photography skills – she managed a couple of good shots of the flying birds too. It was very nice to watch the flora and fauna around us.

After a quick snack cum lunch at 4:00PM, we headed towards Bangalore. We really still could not believe the way we spent that superb Sunday!