Our next stop was Mysore, we arrived by train in the mid afternoon and took a taxi to our hotel. The hotel was the Grand Mercure …… We had lapsed back into a better class hotel, complete with roof-top pool and fine dining restaurant ……. We must recover our backpacking roots.

Mysore is famed for it's Royal Heritage and especially it's world heritage-listed palace which was a truly amazing building - and also the first place we had visited where the entrance fee was the same for foreigners as it was for nationals. It is illuminated in the evening by 100,000 lightbulbs but only on a Sunday and, unfortunately, we were not there to witness it. Mysore is also famous for Ashtanga Yoga, silk sarees, sandalwood and incense.

The main catholic church, St Philomena's was very impressive - Philomena is of course the name of one of Dan's sister's ……Not sure about the saint part.

One of the evening's we took a walking tour through the city, visiting all the places of interest and a slow informative walk through the Devaraja market. Even a separate "lane" just for bananas, apparently it stops all the other fruit and veg ripening too quickly. Also, lots of conical piles of coloured powder used for bindi dots.

Our guide introduced us to various types of street food….. we had largely avoided street food up to this point but our guide assured us that in over 3000 tourists, he had never had a case of "Delhi Belly" - We went for it! We tasted some dishes typical to Mysore such as Mysore Pak, Mysore Masala Dosa, Mysore Churumuri.

True to his word, the food was delicious and our bowels remained intact.

On our last day we visited a nearby town called Srirangapatnam full of history, and was interesting to learn of the war waged by the British in 1799.

On our final night, emboldened by our success "on the street" and armed with some recommendations from our guide, we ventured alone deep into local territory, ending up at a restaurant that looked very dubious from the outside. We climbed the forbidding stairs, pressing past characters from a 1940's movie and eventually arrived on a rooftop overlooking Ghandi square, which was actually circular. The food was good, the beer cheap and the atmosphere buzzing……. We were ready to move on.