Well, I might get a holiday after all starting in 2 days, or I may not - we're still trying to figure it out. Judging by the way things have been so far - *fingers still crossed*

Anyway - pics from a weekend trip, last month to the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Thekkady, Kerala. The reserve runs a couple of programmes, of which is titled, rather splendidly, The Tiger Trail. the Periyar Reserve is part of Project Tiger and has about 80 of them.

None of those deigned to give us a glimpse though:(

The Tiger Trail itself thought is a lovely programme. They equip you with leech socks (!), guides, and a gunman, guide you on a trek into the forest, set up a camp for you, feed you awesome food, take you on a bamboo raft and then further into the forest, and basically ensure you have a nice time away from civilisation. It's supposed to be rough, and manages to be to some extent:). I got invited by a friend who was planning it with other friends and got my aye in, just in time. They cap the number of people at 5:o

You get to see animals running away from you [we saw bison, wild boar (they look exactly like they do in Asterix comics:)) and sambar deer running away and two elephant families, not running away since we were fairly far from them], pretty flowers, fungii, and a lot of the Periyar reservoir. The reservoir itself makes for an interesting picture - the tree trunks still poke out of the water!

( Picses of fungi, flora, elephants and other animals! )

I’ve wanted to go to Shillong for a very long time now. Well I wanted to go when we’d done the family holiday in Assam, and places like Shillong were not as crowded as they are now, and (since that was in May), would have been awesomely cloudy and damp and all:o but that didn't happen. so, when work came up there, I jumped:)

Anyway, finally landed there for a day last week. It’s a nice little town, albeit a little crowded as hill towns tend to be. But it's very pretty and green and full of little waterfalls everywhere and a lake and a botanical garden and flowers.

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I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Cherrapunji. It’s known to be one of the wettest places on earth, but it’s rather dry this time of the year.
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The road en route is pretty though probably much greener during the rains.
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The place to be is at these awesome cliffs. During the monsoons, the water falls all the way down these cliffs into a river at the bottom of the valley:o
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There’s spelunking to be done too. The state of Meghalaya has a 1000+ caves. The Mawsmai cave at Cherapunji is just one of them. It’s all lit up inside, a nice yellow light that makes the whole picture look very Alan Lee-ish.
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And what I loved the most...

Enroute to Shillong falls Umiam Lake, also known as Barapani. When I was a kid I'd read Lila Majumdar's Barapani, about a little boy who lives with his mother and his granduncle in a small village in the hills. his ftaher is a forester in the western himalayas I think. It was a lovely story and full of these nature facts kind of things – all about trees and animals and a picnic at a forest department thingy where they’re taught all about forest fires, and all through the story the kids keep eating! The name comes from the granduncle wishing to go down to Barapani for something. I’m not entirely sure whether it had a symbolic meaning or not, but the book was really, really good.

So I was pretty excited to actually see the lake. It’s amazingly beautiful, and as the wikimapia link shows, it’s HUGE!

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I spent a day in Kolkata last month. Not long enough to have any real fun but just about long enough to eat egg rolls at a street corner, desserts at Flury’s, work(!), and squeeze in a joyride on a tram!

Kolkata is one of the few cities that still has trams. They run on very limited routes now, though, and in a lot of places, while you have the tracks on the road, the service has been discontinued. It took a bunch of phone calls to Mumbai (old Kolkata hands residing there), a few random conversations with taxi drivers, hotel staff, random passengers on the metro, a little badgering of the people at work – till we finally found a small tramable section between the workplace and the airport. It was a ten minute stretch, no more, but ooh so much fun! It’s ridiculously economical too!

Kolkata itself was awesome as ever.

( Tram pics! )
And then sometime later last month, I hopped over to Guwahati. Been there before and had only a day, so didn’t do much, apart from stop and stare at the Brahmaputra a bit.

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And just so we get the Mighty aspect of this river clear, here's how it looks like from the sky

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I did actually have other stuff to post - pics from tram ride in Kolkata, rivers pics from Assam, and some nice pics of a marathon trail

But I’m too lazy for the accompanying ‘prose’, so here goes instead...

Every November or thereabouts Bangalore turns a nice pinkish purplish shade for a few weeks, because of the Tabebuia avellanedae. One of the best places to catch that is the ole favourite run site - Cubbon Park. I hopped over a little later than the usual morning run time and just before the Sunday morning traffic time and managed to get a few pics…

( clicky for the pwettiness )

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now – pics from a monsoon trek to Tadiyandamol in Coorg way back in August, but then I seem to have spent most of the last few weeks hopping all over the western part of the country, and not on holiday. This resulted in solemn resolutions on holidays, and peace and calm and the like, but that’s about all:)

Back to the pics...

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I might have mentioned it in the past - I love cheesecake (the desserts and other food albums in facebook, et al consist predominantly of pics of cheesecakes in various places:)). It’s often a toss up between chocolate brownies and cheesecake but while you get brownies nearly anywhere (although of varying quality), cheesecakes are an entirely different story.

I usually start jumping the moment I see cheesecake on the menu, but more often than not, they don’t quite meet expectation - there’s the rather awful orange cheesecake at Sweet Chariot, and then the Irish Cream cheesecake at Ice n Spice which does not have an Irish Cream flavour but does taste like a vanilla mousse with chocolate swirls on top. Infinitea and Daily Bread have decent enough cheesecakes but from what I recall nothing to go screaming to town over.

But one keeps trying, so when we went out for lunch to a place we hadn’t tried before, and saw cheesecakes in the display, and since fellow cheesecake aficionados were around, there was some collective jumping.

I’m glad to proclaim that one bite into the kiwi cheesecake at La Patisserie off St. Mark’s Road and the world was suddenly a better place to live in.


( Yumminess )

This is one of the few places where the crust melts in your mouth, and it has just the right amount of sweetness and flavour. There’s that teensy layer of cake in the middle of the topping which adds an awesome touch, because the topping has soaked it through. And the topping itself just melts in your mouth too. It’s a little too sweet and so the kiwi flavour gets slightly overrun but that’s actually okay.

The rest of their food (predominantly sandwiches, pizzas, quiches and pies) is very nice too It’s one of those tiny places with a wood flooring and hacky chairs, and all white patterned cutlery, an open view to the side street it’s in. And they serve you flavoured water… the water jugs are stuffed with mint leaves and lemons. The other desserts are nice too, there was a chocolate thingy that was quite yummy.




But the cheesecakes remain to die for.

It's flowering season for the gulmohar! Yippee!

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The double rainbow yesterday - from the terrace of the ugly green building. It was huge and very, very clear. We could see almost every colour from the window.

And then up on the terrace, we realised we could see the entire arc.



Check out the secondary rainbow on the right.

The sun finally showed up in Chennai yesterday, and then promptly started to set.

Dusty skies give good sunsets as anyone who has witnessed a Delhi summer would tell you. Cloudy skies also give you decent sunsets though...



And in Bangalore today, there is a double rainbow:)

Last weekend before the world got a little crazier, as it often does, at far too regular intervals, there was weekend in Auroville and Pondicherry. As usual there was food, surprisingly unphotographed (may I never commit such a slight again) and pretty sights. And I ran my first ever half marathon on a lovely trail inside Auroville (also unphotographed) :o)

...is pretty.

I wanted to usher in the new year amidst a natural feature of any sort – mountain, sea or river. I got me a hilly forest with a river not too far, with a few friends and friends of friends.

We did a road trip to the Dandeli, although not entirely to plan. Dandeli is predominantly forest area and like every other respectable jungle in the country claims to evoke memories of Kipling's Jungle Book.

( lots of picses in here )

Yesterday, we set out to climb this mountain. It's called Brahmagiri and it's in South Coorg, near the Kerala border. Those lines are apparently the border markings.



After trudging 7+ kms through coffee estates, grasslands, and woods, across streams, waterfalls and minor cascades, braving leeches and sundry other insect life, we reached the base of the peak. And then had to stop and turn back because these guys decided to have a bit of a party on the mountain.



First there were two of them, and then a mommy and her kid followed, so prudent minds terminated the journey, and once the camerawork was done, we set back. This is rather depressing. Much as the elephants might be impressive and all that, we still left the mountain unclimbed. *sigh*

( lots of pics under the cut )

Or the impact or whatever you call it of globalisation on the neighbourhood market or pinkoliphaunt rambles on about days gone by because nothing interesting happens in her life currently

Somewhere in the middle of Delhi, tucked snugly between very comfortably wide tree-lined roads named after sundry Mughal and Rajput rulers and other Indian and non-Indian personalities – mythical or real, lies a little market called Khan Market. It’s smaller than most shopping areas in Delhi and the only reason for its mention here is that I grew up on one of the surrounding roads way back in the 80s and 90s. I grew up in a nice part of Delhi *sigh*

It did have a slightly upmarket tinge to it, primarily because it’s in the middle of the central government and diplomatic residential areas. But it also had a fair amount of a regular neighbourhood market flavour to it. It was a sort of local market for all of us who lived there courtesy the GoI. You went there to bank, buy groceries, stationery and stuff like that. You didn’t however go there for clothes, not even after the funny little 'boutiques' opened because they were sad ones, and you didn’t go there much to eat either, although there were a couple of places you could go to, because they were again sad, until a pizza place came up but then you didn’t eat that much pizza then either. And although Biotique did open an outlet you still bought stuff at the 24 hour chemists’.

There were excellent bookshops though, including one where I found a Penguin orange edition of the now clearly out of print Mike at Wrykyn.

But now, I’m quite sure more than six years after leaving Delhi, my parents will not quite recognize the place they used for their daily shopping in the crazy Saturday morning haunt for the not at all poor that it has become now.

So I took pics while I stopped there, between a wedding and a shopping spree, for a few nibbles at an organic food place above a bookshop that wasn’t there earlier.

So here we go...

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OTOH, Sunday morning traffic at Connaught Place, Inner Circle.

Bangalore roads without traffic:o)



We went up to the terrace today, after lunch. It's messy and full of all sorts of stuff but nice nevertheless. The view is surprisingly interesting for a commercial district, including a very well-kept lawn in somebody's bungalow and surprisingly grassless school grounds.

Mondays bore me.

This is unsurprising but I feel compelled to state for the record that a Monday seems to bring with it all the pointlessness of the routine, and a reminder that the work you lugged home for the weekend never got done anyway.

Anyway, one more hike this weekend - to Rangaswamy Hills, part of BR Hills, and therefore a part of the Kaveri wildlife sanctuary, about an hour and a half down from Art of Living on Kanakpura Road.
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Edit: Also saw what was apparently a bear trail - the bushes had been manipulated into a sort of archway, at about waist height. Imagine bear on all fours ambling through the foliage. They apparently have a few regularly used trails which they use to go to the watering holes or to the villages at night, and hence the bushes remained shaped that way. There were no paw marks though.

The local wing of the yhai had a moonlight trek two weekends ago. It was as lovely as it sounds.

We drove up to Skandagiri, a hill outside the city, opposite the more famous Nandi hills.



It’s a reasonably small trek, 4 kms one way and not very steep at all. It was a full moon night, so plenty of light along the way, aided on by torches, barring the odd encounter with mist. There was some cloud cover too, and plenty of light drizzles on the way, which made walking up the smoother rock surfaces all the more interesting!

There’s a tank at the top of the hill, which steps going down to algae-filled water, and a small shelter near that. It turned out to be surprisingly windy and cold, so we needed a campfire at the shelter. We stayed there till a little before dawn and then climbed down. I wish I could say we got to see dawn over the hills but there was far too much cloud cover for that.

The group turned out to be a nice, fun one too, so nice yay trip:)
Pics here though not many of the moonlit phase!

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At Blossom yesterday...

... but this was on the West coast. Almost all the way down to the end of it at Trivandrum. My friend got married there on Saturday.

The much anticipated and prepared for monsoon (Waterproof jacket, old sandals, cameras) however did not deign to show up. This left a lot of the people involved with the wedding quite happy though. The wedding itself was nice fun, and was followed by a yummy lunch reception. And then we all trooped over to the groom's house after that, socialised a bit, and then hit the beaches.

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It's pouring outside. Half an hour ago the sky looked like this...