The long weekend with an extended holiday on Monday on account of Independence Day has seen a surge in tourists visiting Mysuru.
The traffic on the Mysuru-Bengaluru highway on Saturday was heavy with bumper-to-bumper traffic and the places of tourist interest, mainly the palace, zoo, Chamundi Hills and the KRS, was teeming with visitors.
There was a tremendous rush at the Mysuru zoo and the parking avenue was full throughout the day with vehicles spilling over to the roads and the parking lot at the nearby Karnataka Exhibition Grounds.
While the weekend crowd tends to be high in Mysuru normally, the four-day holiday starting from Friday, which was a restricted holiday on account of Varamahalakshmi festival, followed by second Saturday during which most offices are closed has resulted in the surge.
Summer holidays during April-May tend to draw similar crowd but the tourists have the option of visiting Kodagu and Chikkamagaluru for cooler climate conditions. But it being rainy season now the two options are not favoured and hence Mysuru witnesses a heavy rush.
This is the first such surge for the new season coming ahead of Daasara. June and July tend to be lean seasons for Mysuru as educational institutions would have just having opened for the new academic year.
The city receives around 3.5 million tourists every year but more than 90 per cent of them are domestic tourists.
The onset of Dasara and the days following it will witness a similar surge and the stakeholders in the tourism sector want the government to remove the vehicle entry tax to ensure higher traffic. But there are also concerns over the existing infrastructure’s capacity to absorb a high turnout.
