Back to Backpacking

I've just concluded my (first) stay in Bangalore. The city's ubiquitous technical industry and cosmopolitan attitude have hit close enough to home that it's not hard to imagine returning in the future. Feeling comfortable with the number of inroads I made into the engineering community, I decided it was time to move further south.
I'm in Mysore now, three hours southwest of Bangalore by bus, which means I covered all of 70 miles. This is about the number of miles between San Francisco and Morgan Hill, a drive which normally takes as many minutes to complete. Distances mean a lot more in India than in the States. Naturally, urban distances are doubly more difficult to traverse. In traffic-clogged Bangalore, even if you have twenty minutes to make it to a meeting just 2 miles away, God help you.
As I write I'm in a budget hotel near Mysore's palace, on the Internet through my phone's crawling data connection. I watch as the mosquitoes in the room stealthily grow fatter at my expense. It's time to invest in a mosquito net, as soon as I can find one. In the meantime, I'm applying liberal amounts of the dwindling supply of bug repellent.
After so much time spent in cities, I'm trying hard to see the more remote palaces and temples. It's a challenge for someone who would much rather visit the local museum of industrial history. I'll scratch a few must-see religious sites off my to-do list before heading to Kerala for a week of surf lessons followed by lazy houseboat rides down the network of backwater 'highways'.