8-9: Hyderabad
Day One: Central Hyderabad
Kite flyers in Hyderabad |
Charminar |
Chowmahalla Palace |
Musi River, Hyderabad |
The Buddha statue, Hussain Sagar lake |
Day Two: Golconda Fort
Golconda Fort |
Our second day in Hyderabad began with the drawn-out process of booking the tickets for our onward journey to Hampi. Having found a bus company that would take us; we turned up at their office to find that the manager was out until later. Our tuk-tuk driver tried to help us out by taking us to another place, however they turned out to be just as useless as the first company – which we ended up returning to after all. After spending all morning trying, we finally sorted out our tickets – getting the evening bus from Hyderabad to Hospet (near Hampi) with a company called SRE (Aranth) Travels.
Inside the fort |
Our driver for the morning had been pretty useful thus far, so after grabbing some lunch at the hotel we decided to keep him for the rest of the day to visit one of the main sights in the city – the Golconda Fort. Situated about half an hour away, the 16th century fort is sprawled over a large hill with views back over the city and surrounding countryside. We declined to get a guide, as we figured that many of the technical details would probably be similar to what we had found out about at Daulatabad – instead we walked up to the citadel at a leisurely pace, stopping all along the way for photos with locals who seemed far more interested in us than in the fort itself. Golconda seemed to be a popular destination for locals to just come and hang out and seemed to be in a better state of repair than Daulatabad – no sheer drops, crumbling staircases or pitch-black, bat-infested tunnels. It was definitely worth coming out to.
View back over the city |
Birla Mandir |
On our way back into the city we stopped briefly at the Birla Mandir, a temple constructed entirely from white marble, sitting on top of a hill in the middle of the city with views over the lake. We found out that today was a religious festival (which was apparently why so many people had been flying kites), meaning that the temple was absolutely rammed with people. From my experience so far, Indians are about the worst people on the planet for queuing patiently so, despite its beautiful location, the temple wasn’t a particularly spiritual experience – more like sales shopping. With that, we had finished our Hyderabad sightseeing and began to prepare ourselves for our overnight bus journey. As I have mentioned before, neither of us were particularly excited about the overnight buses, but we had done our best to plan them to have the least negative impact on the trip. Our bus (an air-con seater, rather than sleeper) was to leave Hyderabad at 7.30pm and arrive in Hospet at 4.00am - giving us the difficult decision about whether to book a hotel that night in Hospet. We decided to go for it and this turned out to be an excellent decision as (unbelievably) the bus arrived over an hour early after a journey which I can have no complaints about. Turning up at our hotel (the Malligi) at 3.00am, we actually ended up having a reasonable night’s sleep in the end.
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