Ok, decided to try the African continent this time and here we are in Egypt. This time I am actually jotting thoughts down as the day progresses rather than months later!!!!!! Our grand plan includes Cairo, the nile cruise, alexandria and siwa and our group is larger and efinetely more interesting!!!! The trip started disastrously on Gulf Air, the Chennai - Bahrain segment was the worst I have experienced in all my air travels and Jay and I whined non stop.... Fortunately we had a brief stopver at Bahrain and Raghu's Saturday ritual went as planned with breakfast at Sangeetha. And [View Full Entry]

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Coorg it was for a long weekend. It's hard to believe that i have never been to Coorg having lived in the south all my life. We decided to try the homestay option and this landed us in Polaycad. Polaycad is a lovely old colonial bungalow adjoining the coffee estate and belongs to Mrs and Mr Cariappa, a lovely couple who hosted for 3 whole days. As Robin Cariappa explained to us on the tour of estate that "polay" in Coorgi language means river and "cad" means forest as is in Tamil also. The language that the coorgis speak is a [View Full Entry]

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Turkey it was this December. It was cold and freezing but that didnt diminish the beauty of the sprawling country that it is. We decided to start driving in the cappadocia region right upto Izmir on the western coast. We screwed up in our planning and that was evident when we flew into Kayseri and paid a hefty sum to our taxi driver get to our hotel!!!! Given that we were renting a car, we should have done it at the airport and driven up, well that was learning on day 1. We spent our time driving around the small roads [View Full Entry]

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We were in madrid almost two years back and I never quite got around to putting my ecstasy to something more readable!!! Well 2 years later, here I am trying to put it all down.. It was my first visit to Europe and it was an interesting perspective. Not going to write about specific places, but the overall difference in culture of a "western" country as compared to US was a pleasant surprise. The richness of architecture, the messages of history and tradition that most places had was wonderful. I loved the way the women dressed. I haven't been to Paris, [View Full Entry]

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Phnom Penh was a year back and very unforgettable. The city in itself has nothing to write home about. Especially if one lives in a country like India, it was like moving through a different region in India !!!!! We were taken to the museum soon after we landed and we are not great museum people, so could not go gaga about it. Though what struck us was how every statue of Buddha in the museum was used to rake in some money. I wasn't entirely sure if the money was actually going towards museum upkeep 'coz i saw it reach [View Full Entry]

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