I haven't seen much of Southern India, and whatever little I have, was when I was an ankle-biter, which is enough to say that I have no memories of my southern sojourns whatsoever. Then towards the beginning of last week, my family (consisting of my parents, my aunt and her family, plus an extremely odd uncle - more on him in another post) decided to take a mini vacation to the state of Karnataka, which retrospectively turned out to be both a good and a bad thing.

It was good because thanks to the immediacy of the event, the fact that I've quit my job and have nothing to do hasn't quite sunk in. It was bad, clearly due to the season in which the trip was planned. Southern India is pretty much an overheated sauna throughout the year, and this being summer, visiting the state was the equivalent of cooking a pizza and sitting in the oven at the same time. With day time temparatures reaching close to 40 degrees celsius, our air-conditioned car resembled a pressure cooker. It was thanks entirely due to the heat that we cut short our vacation by 3 days, so we could only visit 4 of the 7 places that we had originally planned on seeing.

Enough said. I did however get the chance to be awestruck more than a few times, and definitely plan to revisit the place - in (some) winter. Here are a few pics that I managed to click:

This one was taken from the car. Whoever said India has terrible roads will eat their words. The Golden Quadrilateral project connecting the four metros has been a godsend, and the roads are almost picture perfect!



These two were taken at a place called Badami, which is well-known for its caves.






Alright, I'm bored of the commentary so I'm just going to post the pics and for those of you that are very keen on knowing more, please write in!












I couldn't resist this - the mural above was almost 30 feet across. Wonder how they ever built that one! Over and out.