The Journey (Part II)

The next day I had plans to go to Ranganathitu (a bird Santuary) in Mysore. In the peak season there are about 13000 birds in the santuary (I do not know how many species). I had to use my new camera - The Sony CyberShot H-50 to capture some pictures of the birds there. Arpan and I went to the sanctuary by 3:00 pm. I was so disappointed on reaching there, very few birds were there. The people at the sanctuary told us that December is not the season. The birds will be back in feb. "Oh Shit!!!" (what a bad time for a vacation). We did take the boat ride and tried to capture whatever birds were there. There were number of bats hanging from the tree and of course a few crocodiles.

Here are some pictures taken at Ranganathitu:








MORE TO BE ADDED...keep watching..

The Journey (Part I)

In this post I mention about my journey from Mumbai to home (Jamshedpur). The route I took was from Mumbai-Bangalore-Mysore-Bangalore-Jamshedpur. Your really do not have to take this route; there are direct trains from Mumbai to Jamshedpur (Tatanagar, is the name of the station); but I have my reasons. The earlier plan was to go to Mysore and then to Jamshedpur from there. I earlier worked at Infosys, Mysore and I had not completely shifted from the place i.e. I still had some stuff (mostly cloths) to be brought from Mysore, so I had planned to go to Mysore. Plus this would give me an opportunity to meet old friends. I later decided to stop over at Bangalore because there was a conference (FSTTCS) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus.

I reached the IISc campus in the morning of 8th December 2008. I was accompanied with Chinmoy (grad student at TIFR) and Shreyas (grad student with IITB). I was alloted a room at the Hoysala Guest house. Some of my friends had received accomodation in hostle on a sharing basis. We went around the campus, met Kavitha (earlier a grad student at TIFR now a faculty at IISc) and then we went to the Microsoft Research Bangalore because Chinmoy had to meet someone.

The next day we went for the presentations at the conference. And in the evening IISc had a movie show ('A Wednesday') in the gymkhana. The next day I had to go to Mysore. I reached Mysore at 6:00 pm the next day. I reached home (my home when I was in Mysore). No one was there but I knew where the key was (the same old place). And then I called Arpan because his bike was parked in the parking area, he was not to be seen anywhere. He told me he would be coming home in some time (it took around an hour for him to come home).

That night we had plans for the dinner outside but this lead us to another problem, one which we always face in such a situation, - 'Where should we go?' . There were certain constraints that we had to fulfill. We could not go to some places because some of the friends were having party the next day and they were not ready to go to the same places. Ashish came up with a place, he wanted to try a new place (because is the new restaraunt explorer) but we were not ready for that. Our experience with new places had been really bad, and we were in no mood to have a bad time. We finally decided to go to 'Jewel Rock' a new restaurant to me but not to the others. The food was good. And once we finished the dinner we went to Chamundi Hill. There is a temple at the top of the hill. But we were not going to the temple and any ways at 10 in the night the temple is not open. But the view point at the top of the hill was kind of our hangout place. Had a lot fun there, and gossiped about people :-). I had to catch up on things that I had missed. Here are a few pictures that I took at the Chamundi Hill.




Some pictures at the Mysore Palace.

There and Back Again - A Travellers Tale (Part I)

The Journey to Ayodhya

My Journey began at 9:30pm when I left with my Aunt and sister for Ayodhya from Tatanagar (Jamshedpur). The remaining berths around were empty and I thought that they were empty and someone will later occupy in the night as it was departure time already but then immediatly two more people (mother and son) came in and occupied there seat next to ours. Then after some time it was time to sleep.

As I knew that we would reach our destination earliest by 11 O’clock. I tried to sleep as long as I could, because its really hard to pass time in the train. I got up after we had passed the Varanasi (Banaras) station. Although my sleep had been broken when a vendor came it the compartment shouting "Paper - News Paper, Hindi newspaper english newspaper". It was July and the monsoons had arrived, the view of the country side was really amazing; green fields, ponds filled with water and people working in the fields. Here are a few pictures I took with the help of my cellphone from the train.





My sister had given me a copy of "Angels and Deamons" which I haven't read till then. I started reading the book to pass some time. The train was suppose to be at Faizabad (my destination) by 12:00 pm or so. But, it was now running late by at least an hour. Ayodhya (the I had to reach) station comes on the way but the train does not stop there so we had to get down at the next stop i.e. Faizabad. Sometimes the train stops at Ayodhya, due to some signaling issues, so we had planned if it does stop we will get down at Ayodhya itself. To our disappointment the train did not stop in Ayodhya. But, it stopped at 'Acharya Narendra Dev Nagar' the only station between Ayodhya and Faizabad for about 20 minutes. That's when we were really annoyed. After sometime we reached Faizabad and then took an auto to Ayodhya and then a cycle rickshaw to our home in the village. It was about 2:30 pm when we reached home.

Trip to Sikkim

Trip to Sikkim

Few pics of my trip to Sikkim.