Hyderabad - my kind of city!

HYDERABAD

It's been a while since I've been in a big city - and usually I don't really like them - but I really like Hyderabad. It's a great mixture of "Indian culture" and "all things western". A large percentage of the population is Muslim which is very different to where we have been ... just another face of India. At first it was quite strange to see so many women dressed in Burkas ... head to toe in black with only their eyes uncovered.

Day one we took a 3 wheeler to Charminar, the cities most famous landmark that commemorates the end of a devastating epidemic. After that we walked around the Mecca Masjid (one of the worlds largest mosques with space for 10,000 worshippers) and then bought very yummy fruit from the market place just outside and headed back to the guesthouse.

Day two we took a 3 wheeler to the 16th century Golconda Fort. The area is massive with the citadel contained inside. It's impressive now, so back then it would have been extraordinary. After that ... the Tombs of Qutb Shahi Kings. Such huge extravagant buildings for someone that's .. uhmm ... dead.

BIDAR

Charminar

- Friday May 12

We took a day trip to Bidar ... 4 hours there and 4 hours back. The bus trip there was awful... really slow in a dilapidated bus... but the trip home was five star in an air conditioned Volvo bus. Noice!

In Bidar we hired a 3 wheeler and visited;

Bidar Fort
"A stronghold of the Bahamani Kings in the 14th and 15th centuries. The fort is surrounded by three miles of walls with 37 bastions, most of them surmounted with cannons. The fort now lies in ruins"

Nanak Jhera
Pilgrimage centre for Sikhs

Narasimha Zarni Rock Temple
The temple is carved into the plateau and you have to wade through waist deep water (with heaps of bats hanging from the roof!) to get a view of Lord Narasimha. I might have given it a go, but I didn't fancy sitting in wet clothes for the 4 hour bus ride home. What a sook!

Day four we shopped! It was so nice to buy western clothes again after looking like a complete dag for the past 6 months. That night we wanted to go out and we'd become quite friendly with the guy on the front desk of our hotel "Aleem" so we invited him out too. He and his friend "Jappa" picked us up on their motorbikes and off we set. We didn't have a lot of success though, it was already 10pm and most bars close at 11pm and the ones that don't have a hefty entrance fee. Strange that there's no night life in such a big city ... perhaps there's no market for it here given the large Muslim population .. who don't drink.

On our final day we took the long bus ride out to the Ramoji Film City. Perhaps our expectations were too high but it was a far cry from Bollywood and the tours weren't in English so we didn't know what we were looking at. So we were back on a bus pretty quickly, back to Hyderabad, to catch our overnight train to Orissa.

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