Karnataka Tour Package 8 Days

Bangalore's Kempegowda International Airport lies far to the north of the city, and our driver stands outside arrivals holding a placard with your name. The ride into central Bangalore can take anything from an hour to two, depending on traffic, so it is worth resting first if you came in on an overnight flight. Hotel check-in is normally from the early afternoon, and an early room can be held for you if you tell us your arrival time when booking. A member of our local team visits your hotel with your printed plan, explain the next few days and help with a local SIM card.

Once you have slept and eaten, the afternoon starts in Lalbagh Botanical Garden. Hyder Ali started it in the 18th century and his son Tipu Sultan enlarged it with plants here from as far away as Kabul and Mauritius. Your guide shows you the glasshouse built in 1889 on the model of London's Crystal Palace, a lake fringed with bamboo, and a huge outcrop of granite-gneiss rock counted among the oldest exposed rock on Earth, at some three billion years. On top of that rock stands one of four small watchtowers said to mark the limits of the town founded by the chieftain Kempegowda in the 16th century.

Basavanagudi, a short drive south, is an old residential neighborhood with tree-lined streets and some of the city's best traditional cafés. The Bull Temple here holds a monolithic Nandi, Shiva's bull, carved from a single grey granite boulder and blackened over the centuries by oil lamps and offerings. Every November or December the streets around it fill for the Kadalekai Parishe, a groundnut fair that began as a thank-you from local farmers. Finish with a crisp dosa, butter-topped in the local style, and filter coffee at a busy local restaurant before heading back to rest. Overnight in Bangalore.

Leave Bangalore after breakfast, ideally before the morning office traffic builds, and join the expressway heading south-west toward Mysore. Some 2.5 hours on, a bridge over one arm of the Kaveri River carries you onto Srirangapatna, the river-island town that Hyder Ali and then Tipu Sultan ruled from in the late 1700s. Tipu was one of the fiercest opponents of the British East India Company, and his capital fell to a combined British army in 1799, when he was killed near the northern ramparts. Your guide walks you to the spot inside the old fort where his body was found.

Nearby is the Daria Daulat Bagh, Tipu's teak-built summer palace, which stands in a formal garden. Its outer walls are covered with painted murals showing his army defeating the British at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, complete with cavalry, elephants and red-coated soldiers in disarray. Inside, a small museum holds portraits, coins and maps from the period. You also visit the white-domed Gumbaz, the mausoleum Tipu built for his parents, where he was later buried beside them, with its lacquered doors and tiger-stripe wall patterns. The island's large Ranganathaswamy Temple, older than all of these, can be added if time allows.

The last stretch to Mysore is only around 30 minutes, and you check in by early afternoon. Nothing else is planned for today, so you can rest by the pool or wander nearby streets on foot. If it happens to be a Sunday or public holiday, we time a visit to the palace gates for shortly before 7 pm; the whole facade is then lit by close to 100,000 bulbs for roughly 45 minutes. Otherwise, a quiet dinner of bisi bele bath (rice and lentils cooked with tamarind and spice) and a square of rich Mysore pak for dessert is a good first taste of the city. Overnight in Mysore.

The Wodeyar family ruled Mysore, on and off, for more than five centuries, and the palace you see today replaced an older wooden one that burned down in 1897. Designed by the British architect Henry Irwin and finished in 1912, the Mysore Palace mixes Hindu, Mughal, Rajput and Gothic ideas beneath its domes and arches. You walk with your guide through the Kalyana Mantapa, the marriage pavilion with its stained-glass ceiling, the public durbar hall facing Chamundi Hill, and corridors lined with oil paintings of the Dasara procession. Shoes go into a deposit counter outside, and the rules on photography inside the halls are strictly enforced.

A road winds up to the top of Chamundi Hill, some 13 km out of town, where the Chamundeshwari Temple is dedicated to the goddess who, in local legend, slew the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasura, the figure from whom Mysore takes its name. Expect queues on weekends and festival days. Coming back down, your driver pulls over beside the giant Nandi that sculptors cut from granite in the 1600s, nearly five meters tall and hung with stone bells and garlands. Fit visitors can choose to walk down the roughly 1,000 stone steps instead, which takes around 45 minutes and passes small shrines and monkeys.

The afternoon belongs to the Devaraja Market, a 19th-century covered bazaar where traders stack cones of colored kumkum powder, sell jasmine and marigold by the meter and hand out ripe bananas of several varieties to taste. Your guide helps you find good sandalwood soap, incense and Mysore silk at fair prices. Nearby stands St. Philomena's Cathedral, whose twin neo-Gothic spires were completed in 1956 and borrow from Cologne Cathedral in Germany. The evening is yours, perhaps for a yoga class, since Mysore is a well-known center for Ashtanga practice. Overnight in Mysore.

Heading west out of Mysore, the land starts to change within an hour, as flat sugarcane and paddy fields give way to rolling hills and first glimpses of the Western Ghats. Around the halfway point you reach Bylakuppe, among the biggest Tibetan refugee settlements anywhere outside Tibet, set up on land granted by the state government in the early 1960s. Thousands of monks, nuns and lay families live here among maize fields, small shops and prayer flags. Your stop here is Namdroling Monastery, home to a large community of monks who train in the Nyingma lineage.

Inside the monastery's main temple, often called the Golden Temple, three gilded statues of Buddha Shakyamuni, Padmasambhava and Amitayus rise nearly 18 meters behind rows of cushions for the monks. Arrive during prayer time and the hall fills with long brass horns, cymbals and drums; quiet visitors are free to sit along the rear wall and listen. Remove your shoes before entering and keep your voice low. Small cafés around the gate serve momos and thukpa, a Tibetan noodle soup, which make a good lunch before you continue into the hills of Kodagu.

Another ninety minutes brings you to Coorg, known locally as Kodagu, where the road climbs through forest and coffee plantations to your estate stay or resort near Madikeri. Coorg is home to the Kodavas, a community with their own language, martial traditions and dress, including a distinctive way of draping the sari with the pleats at the back. Settle in on the veranda with coffee grown on the estate itself and listen to the birdlife in the shade trees. Dinner tonight could include pandi curry, a Kodava pork dish that gets its deep color and sourness from kachampuli, a vinegar boiled down from a local fruit. Overnight in Coorg.

Mornings start slowly in Coorg, with fog lifting off the valleys, and the cool early hours are ideal for walking the rows of a working coffee estate with someone who farms it. Your estate guide explains the difference between the two main types grown here, robusta lower down and arabica on the higher slopes, and shows how silver oak and native trees shade the coffee bushes. Black pepper vines climb up those same trees, and you may also see cardamom, oranges and areca nut grown between the rows. From December to February the coffee cherries turn red and are picked by hand, and you can watch them being dried on open yards.

Mid-morning, the car heads to Abbey Falls, close to Madikeri, where a stream drops through the forest into a rocky pool. A paved path and steps lead down between coffee bushes and spice plants to a suspension footbridge opposite the cascade. The water is at its fullest between July and November and can be little more than a trickle by late spring, so we will set expectations depending on your travel dates. Back in town, your guide takes you to the Madikeri Fort, whose stone walls Tipu Sultan put up in place of an older mud fort, and the Omkareshwara Temple, whose domes show a mix of Islamic and Hindu styles.

After a slow lunch and some rest, it is time for Raja's Seat, a small garden on the edge of Madikeri where the Kodava kings once sat in the evenings to see the light fade over the hills. When the sky is clear, ridge after ridge fades into blue toward the Kerala border. Local families come here too, and vendors sell roasted corn and spiced peanuts by the railings. Before you leave Coorg, it is worth picking up a packet of freshly roasted coffee, local honey or homemade wine from a small family shop in town. Overnight in Coorg.

Say goodbye to the estate after breakfast and drive north-east through Kushalnagar and Shanivarsanthe, where the hills slowly drop away into drier farmland dotted with coconut palms and granite boulders. Roadside stalls along the route, some little more than a bench under a tarpaulin, sell tender coconuts, bananas and jaggery, and your driver knows clean places to stop for a break. You reach Hassan in time for lunch and settle in at your hotel, which serves as a convenient base for the temples of the Hoysala kings, who ruled much of this region between the 11th and 14th centuries.

In the afternoon you drive about 30 km to Halebidu, which was once Dwarasamudra, the Hoysala capital, until armies from the Delhi Sultanate raided it in the early 14th century. Its twin-shrined Hoysaleswara Temple, begun in the 12th century, was never finished, yet its outer walls hold some of the densest stone carving in India. Rows of elephants, lions, mounted warriors and creepers run around the base, each one different from the next, and above them sit panels telling stories of Rama, Krishna and the Pandava brothers. Your guide points out a tiny figure of a dancer whose bangles can still be turned.

Halebidu shares a single 2023 UNESCO inscription, the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas, with Belur and Somanathapura, and low afternoon sun throws the deepest carving here into sharp relief. If time permits, walk a few minutes to the cluster of Jain bastis nearby, whose polished black pillars reflect your face like a mirror. Two huge Nandi statues sit in pavilions facing the main temple, and a small archaeological museum on the grounds holds sculptures recovered from the area. Return to Hassan for dinner and a quiet evening. Overnight in Hassan.

Make an early start for Belur, about 40 minutes from Hassan, while the courtyard is still quiet and the light is soft on the stone. The Chennakeshava Temple was commissioned by the Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana in 1117, traditionally to mark a military victory, and is a living temple where Vishnu is worshipped every day. It is carved from soapstone, a fine-grained rock that is soft when quarried and hardens with time, which allowed the sculptors to cut details as fine as lacework. A tall gopuram tower, added much later, frames the entrance into the paved courtyard.

The temple is best known for its 38 madanikas, bracket figures of celestial women angled out from beneath the roof. Each one is shown in a different pose, dressing her hair, holding a mirror, playing a drum or hunting, and one is said to have a fly carved on her fruit. The hall inside is dim, so your guide carries a pocket torch to pick out the ceiling work and the glossy, lathe-turned columns, each with its own ring pattern. Modest clothes are expected, and footwear stays with an attendant at the entrance.

After lunch in Belur you set off for Bangalore, mostly on good highway through Hassan and Kunigal, reaching the city in the late afternoon. If you have energy, the evening is a good time to sample the city's café and craft beer scene around Indiranagar or Church Street, where some of India's first brewpubs opened. Bangalore also has excellent restaurants serving food from every corner of India, from Andhra biryani to Mangalorean fish curry with neer dosa, the thin rice crepes of the coast. Your driver can wait and take you back to your hotel at the end of the night. Overnight in Bangalore.

If your flight is late enough, the morning can include a visit to Bangalore Palace, built in 1887 for the Wodeyars in a style borrowed from Windsor Castle, with turrets, wooden floors and hunting trophies, or Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace, finished in 1791, its teak pillars and arches painted in faded floral patterns. Both are in the city center and need about an hour each. Your driver then takes you north to Kempegowda International Airport, allowing up to two hours for traffic and three hours for international check-in.

Over eight days you have seen Tipu Sultan's island fortress, the palace city of the Wodeyars, coffee hills cooled by mist and the finest Hoysala carving in India, all linked by short drives. Guests who enjoy this first look at the state often come back for Hampi, Badami and the coast at Gokarna, and our team can put that second trip together for you. Have a safe flight home.