Sometimes, you just need a trip into nature's beautiful garden to realize that the world isn't so depressing after all...Pics from a family trip to Pachmarhi...
Rock Formation at Jatashankar
Pachamarhi Lake
Panchali Kund
Apsara Falls
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Some More Pics
At Reech Caves
(Reech is Hindi for Bear)
Bee Falls
(Reech is Hindi for Bear)
Bee Falls
Bee Falls Part Deux...
Bee Falls Again...
Reech Caves Pic Deux
And Some More Pics...The Last Lot
Denva River Flowing Through a Valley
Just a Forest...A Common Sight
The Satpuras as seen from Mahadeo
A Tree Finds some Nook to Take Root at Mahadeo
Lots of Caves - Mahadeo
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Pilani Travelogue...The Prelude to Pilani Diary
Well, I am not dead...not yet anyways. The weather Gods have been kind and the days from the 22nd till now have alternated between making me apprehensive about the onset of the summer heat for real and enjoying the dust-storms and the thunderstorms being thrown this way - I have counted three of those since I reached here less than a week back (not that I am complaining!)
And so it is that after six days, I have finally found the necessary energy to write about my journey from Delhi to Pilani. And I am going to make this a balanced, colourless and bland account of the entire thing, that I can guarantee.
The journey to Pilani in itself was interesting - it was the first time I was travelling alone from my home to BITS (usually I am a part of a group of at least twenty). Of course, I had a fellow passenger who hailed from the nearby town of Bagar and he promptly began listing the names of all the famous Indian businessmen (or rather business families) who hail from the region around Pilani. Then came the usual running around Delhi trying to get a bus to Pilani (although this time I had taken a refill at McDonalds :) ). Of course, it didn't help that it had rained cats and dogs earlier in the day; so what I got was two buses which were supposed to turn up not turning up (of course, buses don't turn up by themselves, but I reckon everybody but the daftest person would have caught my drift).
So...what I ended up doing was take a bus from Delhi to Bhiwani (which is 80 km from Pilani) in the hope that I'd get another bus from there to my destination. Of course, like all other things that happened on the day, the decision turned out to be bad, very bad...If sitting through two successive B-grade Hindi movies from the 80s that had 60-year old passengers leering at the slightest show of skin of the female kind (well there is only one kind of skin though, isn't there) wasn't enough, the journey which should have taken three hours took four and a half hours. So there I was in Bhiwani having missed the last bus to Pilani (God, everything rhymes!!!!) and better still, the bus stand was closed because of waterlogging due to incessant rains (in the middle of the summer).
So after waiting at an unknown place in the midst of unknown people with no idea of how to go forward, I had to resort to trying hitch-hiking for the first time in my life. So the thumbs came out (though I doubt half of the cars with defective headlights would have seen them) and after an hour of desperate courting of the few who actually stopped, I found myself inside the cabin of a truck with ten other guys - the ten included the driver and his companion.
What followed was a cat-and-mouse game of "Bend your arms and cringe your nose and breathe in to contract your chest and create a millimetre more of space". One has to actually experience it to actually realize the level of expertise that can be attained in this game in two hours of a tiresome journey. Of course, I think I might have won since I was dropped off at the outskirts of Pilani in one piece. It was a closely-fought encounter and I had aches and pain for the next three days to attest for that.
Nice, wasn't it???
And so it is that after six days, I have finally found the necessary energy to write about my journey from Delhi to Pilani. And I am going to make this a balanced, colourless and bland account of the entire thing, that I can guarantee.
The journey to Pilani in itself was interesting - it was the first time I was travelling alone from my home to BITS (usually I am a part of a group of at least twenty). Of course, I had a fellow passenger who hailed from the nearby town of Bagar and he promptly began listing the names of all the famous Indian businessmen (or rather business families) who hail from the region around Pilani. Then came the usual running around Delhi trying to get a bus to Pilani (although this time I had taken a refill at McDonalds :) ). Of course, it didn't help that it had rained cats and dogs earlier in the day; so what I got was two buses which were supposed to turn up not turning up (of course, buses don't turn up by themselves, but I reckon everybody but the daftest person would have caught my drift).
So...what I ended up doing was take a bus from Delhi to Bhiwani (which is 80 km from Pilani) in the hope that I'd get another bus from there to my destination. Of course, like all other things that happened on the day, the decision turned out to be bad, very bad...If sitting through two successive B-grade Hindi movies from the 80s that had 60-year old passengers leering at the slightest show of skin of the female kind (well there is only one kind of skin though, isn't there) wasn't enough, the journey which should have taken three hours took four and a half hours. So there I was in Bhiwani having missed the last bus to Pilani (God, everything rhymes!!!!) and better still, the bus stand was closed because of waterlogging due to incessant rains (in the middle of the summer).
So after waiting at an unknown place in the midst of unknown people with no idea of how to go forward, I had to resort to trying hitch-hiking for the first time in my life. So the thumbs came out (though I doubt half of the cars with defective headlights would have seen them) and after an hour of desperate courting of the few who actually stopped, I found myself inside the cabin of a truck with ten other guys - the ten included the driver and his companion.
What followed was a cat-and-mouse game of "Bend your arms and cringe your nose and breathe in to contract your chest and create a millimetre more of space". One has to actually experience it to actually realize the level of expertise that can be attained in this game in two hours of a tiresome journey. Of course, I think I might have won since I was dropped off at the outskirts of Pilani in one piece. It was a closely-fought encounter and I had aches and pain for the next three days to attest for that.
Nice, wasn't it???
Friday, May 18, 2007
The Experience of A Lifetime!
Well okay, I am exaggerating...and believe me, exaggeration is the proper word for it...well, what I'm referring to is my journey from Pilani to Jaipur on the night of 11th May - more precisely, the stretch of journey from Pilani to Chirawa in a Rajasthan State Transport Bus. Wait a minute! Did I just write 'in'? Wrong! I meant to say 'on'.
This is what happens when you have way too much luggage and too little space inside the bus to accommodate the same...plus the conductor insists on piling on more and more passengers - paying no heed to the creaking parts of the bus, indicating a considerable strain on the bus' load bearing capacity. Indeed, it was out of compulsion rather than due to a weird and highly strung sense of adventure that we - that is, Dhruv and I - decided to act as watchdogs for our luggage and sit atop the bus along with fifteen other crazy men for whom such a daring act of reckless courage (as it appeared to us, of course) was a part of daily commuting.
The experience could well be described as something that brought the both of us closer to heaven - both figuratively and literally. Indeed when I think about it with the gift of hindsight firmly embedded within my senses, I thank my stars for the adrenaline rush that I felt when I began climbing the mini-ladder at the back of the stationary bus at the Pilani bus stop. It was this adrenaline rush that prevented a outpouring of fear while I calmly sat there on the roof - enjoying the blanket of stars above on that moonless night, reveling in the silky touch of the night and mentally philosophizing over the silent night.
Thankfully, the 15 minutes of madness or adventure (whichever you choose to call it) were over in a jiffy and we retook our places within the bus.
And in case you were wondering what happened to our luggage, it was still there on top of the bus throughout the journey, but our luck held and we got everything back safely once the bus pulled up into Jaipur bus station.
As they say, all is well that ends better.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The Arabian Odyssey
This is a piece I wrote a while ago regarding my trip to the sands of Arabia:
You look out of a window and see red, everything red as if on fire. You strain your eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of any other shade except for that fiery red. But you fail miserably from your window high up in the air. As you go on, you get accustomed to sights at the ground level. You see dunes, monstrous on the ground, but tiny from the airplane where you are sitting. Stretching in a straight line like grand armies marching out to meet their foes in war and death, the dunes look like great, grim-faced, battle-worn warriors of sadistic and ruthless nature, who go everywhere in search of death, glory and nothing else. The clouds that you see surrounding you at that altitude of 30,000 feet above the ground (higher even than the world's tallest peak, Mt. Everest) appear red - such is the fire and the power of the desert.
Yet these glimpses are but a poor picture of the beauty of the desert landscape. It is not completely featureless as you initially are led to believe. After the initial shock of seeing something that has often developed the reputation of being a merciless graveyard that kills you slowly but surely, with your own eyes, you begin to decipher the vast desert landscape. You get few chances of taking a piercing look through the reddish-hued clouds and if you capitalize on those opportunities, you see rocks - ragged, monstrous and alone, standing like obstacles that have been created by the Unseen Power to hinder the free wind. There you see ridges appearing out of nowhere. These are brown-black in colour, appearing as if the sun has baked them to the point of being burnt. If you get the fortune, you can see the ragged, cruel cliffs and sheer rocks fashioning steep slopes. These precipices rise from sheer oblivion into the ridges which tower above the desert landscape. It suddenly dawns upon you that nature has fashioned these ridges, not for preventing infiltration by outsiders, but actually for keeping them in once they enter this domain. You may even see a vast mirage occasionally, but you know the desert. You know it is a delusion. You know that it may indeed have proved to be the death knell for many old travellers. You know all this, even from that high place where you are sitting comfortably and striding along with the swirling wind.
The sheer ruggedness and unfriendliness of the terrain is reflected in the landscape. Even the sky beneath the clouds looks red, not due to lights on the ground, but in fact, due to the red, hot sand. The lifeless desert peeks at you from beneath those clouds and you begin to belief that the region is indeed, a ruthless murderer of life. Yet, it is not so. There is vegetation, oh yes, it is sparse but it exists nevertheless. Thorny shrubs establish their realm in this region which support nothing else and you begin to wonder what the Unseen Power must have felt while creating all these.
Then you find the aeroplane is descending. Slowly but surely - in a matter of about ten minutes - you descend to about ten thousand feet. Now you begin to see the ground level more distinctly. You see a road winding down like a thin ribbon across the face of the desert. The road seems to stretch beyond friendly borders and onto the desert on the other side of the horizon.
With the airplane's descent, you know that the end of the journey is near. Soon you begin to see the city where your journey ends. You see houses - small and quiet. You see roads - wide, busy and beautiful. But soon, the aerial vision fades away. Your airplane lands and you step into the cool, air-conditioned clime inside the airport. But the situation on the outside cannot be more different. It is hot. The sunrays penetrate you like painful needles. The temperatures show the weather to be no hotter than 40 degrees, but you know it better than that. Mere statistics cannot convey the dryness of the air and the absence of a single, grey cloud in the sky. It is these factors that make the desert clime all the more unbearable.
Such is the first impression that you get of the Great Arabian Desert, the second largest plateau in the world. It is as if you have stepped into the realms of a whole new world that seems both ancient and modern, both rugged and sophisticated - at one and the same time. Such is the might and the rugged beauty of the desert that you half admire it and half fear it. Admiration, because you appreciate of the existence of such a different civilization only about two and a half thousand miles from your home and fear because you know now how cruel and lifeless nature can make itself.
That is precisely why; you want to modify the opening lines of Blake's poem and say-
You look out of a window and see red, everything red as if on fire. You strain your eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of any other shade except for that fiery red. But you fail miserably from your window high up in the air. As you go on, you get accustomed to sights at the ground level. You see dunes, monstrous on the ground, but tiny from the airplane where you are sitting. Stretching in a straight line like grand armies marching out to meet their foes in war and death, the dunes look like great, grim-faced, battle-worn warriors of sadistic and ruthless nature, who go everywhere in search of death, glory and nothing else. The clouds that you see surrounding you at that altitude of 30,000 feet above the ground (higher even than the world's tallest peak, Mt. Everest) appear red - such is the fire and the power of the desert.
Yet these glimpses are but a poor picture of the beauty of the desert landscape. It is not completely featureless as you initially are led to believe. After the initial shock of seeing something that has often developed the reputation of being a merciless graveyard that kills you slowly but surely, with your own eyes, you begin to decipher the vast desert landscape. You get few chances of taking a piercing look through the reddish-hued clouds and if you capitalize on those opportunities, you see rocks - ragged, monstrous and alone, standing like obstacles that have been created by the Unseen Power to hinder the free wind. There you see ridges appearing out of nowhere. These are brown-black in colour, appearing as if the sun has baked them to the point of being burnt. If you get the fortune, you can see the ragged, cruel cliffs and sheer rocks fashioning steep slopes. These precipices rise from sheer oblivion into the ridges which tower above the desert landscape. It suddenly dawns upon you that nature has fashioned these ridges, not for preventing infiltration by outsiders, but actually for keeping them in once they enter this domain. You may even see a vast mirage occasionally, but you know the desert. You know it is a delusion. You know that it may indeed have proved to be the death knell for many old travellers. You know all this, even from that high place where you are sitting comfortably and striding along with the swirling wind.
The sheer ruggedness and unfriendliness of the terrain is reflected in the landscape. Even the sky beneath the clouds looks red, not due to lights on the ground, but in fact, due to the red, hot sand. The lifeless desert peeks at you from beneath those clouds and you begin to belief that the region is indeed, a ruthless murderer of life. Yet, it is not so. There is vegetation, oh yes, it is sparse but it exists nevertheless. Thorny shrubs establish their realm in this region which support nothing else and you begin to wonder what the Unseen Power must have felt while creating all these.
Then you find the aeroplane is descending. Slowly but surely - in a matter of about ten minutes - you descend to about ten thousand feet. Now you begin to see the ground level more distinctly. You see a road winding down like a thin ribbon across the face of the desert. The road seems to stretch beyond friendly borders and onto the desert on the other side of the horizon.
With the airplane's descent, you know that the end of the journey is near. Soon you begin to see the city where your journey ends. You see houses - small and quiet. You see roads - wide, busy and beautiful. But soon, the aerial vision fades away. Your airplane lands and you step into the cool, air-conditioned clime inside the airport. But the situation on the outside cannot be more different. It is hot. The sunrays penetrate you like painful needles. The temperatures show the weather to be no hotter than 40 degrees, but you know it better than that. Mere statistics cannot convey the dryness of the air and the absence of a single, grey cloud in the sky. It is these factors that make the desert clime all the more unbearable.
Such is the first impression that you get of the Great Arabian Desert, the second largest plateau in the world. It is as if you have stepped into the realms of a whole new world that seems both ancient and modern, both rugged and sophisticated - at one and the same time. Such is the might and the rugged beauty of the desert that you half admire it and half fear it. Admiration, because you appreciate of the existence of such a different civilization only about two and a half thousand miles from your home and fear because you know now how cruel and lifeless nature can make itself.
That is precisely why; you want to modify the opening lines of Blake's poem and say-
'Fire, Fire, Burning Bright,
In the sandy desert's might,
What immortal hand or eye,
Made man, such an enemy?'
Subscribe to:
Posts (RSS)
