Blogs from Bandipur National Park, Karnataka, India, Asia

I’ve been back on the land for two weeks and all kinds of things have happened since, but let me use this post to explain the few weeks I spent at Auroville. After a few more days with the Auroville guys, I left with Ilango and Vikram in the Bolero with all their gear and we drove to Auroville in 10 hours. The trip was mostly uneventful as we listened to a broken Bob Marley cd with the two main highlights being another twister passing us on the road and a very, very tight descent down the mountains with 27 needle pin bends. We arrived at the AV youth centre in the evening. The first few days there were kind of boring to me but then I decided to go out and explore on my own. ... read more

Alright... Dear family, friends, and others who may be reading this... I'm still alive! Hooray! Not that it's really a surprise, but I hope you'll all be pleased to know this. Anyway, let me start with a quick overview of what's going on here: Basically, in search of a form of 'right livelihood', I started studying Regional Development & Innovation (RDI) back in 2012. There I heard about and got interested in permaculture, which lead to my doing a 10-week internship at Quail Springs in California in 2013, as part of my RDI studies. At Quail Springs I met Malvikaa Solanti and Levi Mataga, who have been working on a permaculture project called SwaYYam in South India. After almost a year and a half of 'regular' studying in Wageningen, I contacted Malvikaa to ask if I ... read more

I love morning game drives. Out at dawn, in time to watch the sun come up over the forest. It’s cool but not cold, in the breeze created as you drive in an open jeep. The air is fresh, and smells slightly of smoke, either woodsmoke from the villagers' fires, or from the controlled but now dead fires set along the paths in the forest to improve the chance of seeing animals. So the first ten to twenty feet from the road is dark grey, with a scattering of ash and some lines of white where logs have slowly smouldered out of existence. Beyond that there is sometimes forest and sometimes scrub. The forest consists of mostly spindly trees, well spaced out, with skinny silver trunks, interspersed with some bigger trees with dark bark that looks ... read more

In gleicher Richtung wie am Vortag geht es über Gudalur und Muddumulai nach Bandipur in den Nationalpark. Unsere Unterkunft ist im M.C. Resort, sehr zu empfehlen. Hier kann die vom Klima in Ooty feuchte Kleidung trocknen, auch ohne Klimaanlage in den Zimmern. Der Internetanschluss in der Rezeption wird von uns fleissig genutzt. Am Nachmittag machen wir eine Fahrt mit einem Bus (ohne Fensterscheiben, die Starrachsen anscheinend direkt an die Karosserie geschweisst) in den Park. Wir sehen Damwild, Wasserbüffel, Pfauen, verschiedene Vögel, Termitenbauten, einmal sogar aus der Ferne Elefanten am Wasserloch. Leider keine Tiger. Die Landschaft ist wunderschön, die 2,5h sind schnell vorbei. Unser Fahrer ist in den nächsten Ort gefahren, eine Schwelle auf der Fahrbahn hat eine Blattfeder brechen lassen. Schwellenland Indien: Es gibt fast überall sog. Speed Breaker auf den Straßen, soga... read more

Well my plan for the blog has been a bit thwarted. I had hoped to blog nightly on the train via wi-fi and Anna's laptop. Alas, the internet for the last 7 days was not working. But as I have been told several times, the 2 keys to travel in India are Patience and a Sense of Humor. Keeping this uppermost in my mind has made this a most beautiful and exciting trip. We rode a luxury train called the Golden Chariot for the past week. It works like a cruise ship on land. We sleep and eat on the train and have various excursions during the day. Because of the Mumbai incidents they received a number of cancellations so there were only 12 passengers on the train which has 19 cars including 2 dining cars, ... read more