Anusha and I drove down to Tipu Sultan's fort town in Srirangapatna yesterday. It is close to the city of Mysore and is around 3.5 hours by car from Bangalore (with the current state of the connecting highway).
The fort is supposed to be the second strongest in India and has three strong and wide walls separated by moats that used to be filled with crocodiles. This was the place from where Haider Ali, and then his son Tipu Sultan, ruled over much of the Deccan peninsula and thwarted the advances of the British in alliance with the French. It is also home to the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple that is dedicated to Lord Vishnu and is around 1100 years old!
I had been to this town earlier en route to Mysore as a part of a package tour, but wasn't able see much of it. This time around we could explore the town at our own sweet pace and it was real fun. We even found out the quite well-hidden Thomas Innman's dungeon that was used by Tipu's men to hold captive “unimportant” soldiers (as opposed to Captain Bailey's dungeon that was used to hold the British soldiers and “important” enemy men).
Anusha at the well-hidden Thomas Innman’s Dungeon
I hope we can make more of these wonderful excursions.
As an aside, I have written a small programme that shows how to bind Windows executables to the DLLs they use, so that their loading times are improved.