Yosemite Valley - Day 1 I said in the Introduction that now we are in the Information Age and so can get both verbal as well as visual information about Yosemite on the Net. Thank the Lord for that. However, back in 1981, we were NOT in the Information Age and the Net was in its infancy and not available to the common man/woman. Consequently, our information about USA travel was based on an old dog-eared copy of Fodor’s. Yosemite figured in it only as a footnote to San Francisco environs. But, I had pinned my faith on Mark Twain, who [View Full Entry]

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Mariposa Grove of Big Trees We woke up bleary-eyed quite early the next morning because the cold that had pervaded our ‘unheated’ tent throughout the night had made sound sleep impossible. We had spent the night practically tossing and turning. (And silently cursing ourselves) We were to visit the ‘Mariposa Grove of Big Trees’ that day. Avi generally gets up earlier than me and gets ready for the day. He is a ‘lark’ while I am an ‘owl’. It is my midnight when he gets up, that too cheerfully and greets the day. Some people are just [View Full Entry]

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Vadodara was known as Baroda formerly When I started to write about our recent trip to Vadodara, I found to my delight that the venerable ‘Vatvriksha’ became a mundane ‘Banyan’ tree in English language because early British found that the Hindu Gujrati ‘Banias’ (merchants) mostly conducted their business in the shade of these trees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banyan Whenever I start writing a travelogue, a gather from the Net many such nuggets of what Avi calls “Profuse and Useless Information”. So, dear readers, like Avi, if you a [View Full Entry]

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Exactly one year after the tsunami of 26th December 2004, we found ourselves gazing at the seas off Mahabalipuram and imagining the havoc the tsunami had wrought on that open coast. The previous day, we had visited Marina Beach in Chennai, where the wife of one of our friends from Mumbai, who had gone there for a visit, had been swept away by the tsunami a year back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pagodas_of_Mahabalipuram Perhaps, that is why, I could not write a travelogue about Mahabalipuram till now. Our visit, though born out of curiosity, was tinged with sadness about all th [View Full Entry]

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Toronto is the correct spelling of this Canadian city though most of the people pronounce the name as ‘Toranto’. Avi had to visit Toronto this summer on official work and I accompanied him for sightseeing. This is a highly satisfactory arrangement between us - he enjoys work and I enjoy sightseeing, roaming the streets of a new city, staying and eating in the hotels, shopping, anything but work. Of course, before going to Toronto, I had studied the maps and researched the Net thoroughly and knew that Toronto downtown is small - hardly 4 X 4 miles square. For the first [View Full Entry]

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Peacock is India’s National bird, right? Maharashtra, our State, is supposed to be 'peacock country' with its vast sugar-belt. "HABITAT The Peacock likes deciduous forests and semi-open country flanking hillside streams, with thick undergrowth and thorny creepers. Also forages farmland, particularly dense, tall crops such as sugar cane." This is what I found on the Internet about peacock’s habitat, which applies quite well to Maharashrta. However, we never had an opportunity to see the peacocks in the wild, despite our various visits to various National Parks; though on [View Full Entry]

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Our Daman Trip For the past four years we were planning to visit Daman, where my brother-in-law has a guest-house of his company and where we were assured of a red-carpet welcome. However, something or the other always interfered with our plans. Somehow, we were able to thwart the designs of those interfering Fates this year and just about managed to visit Daman after only one cancellation. I believe as we were going there for ‘Ganpati’, the ‘trouble-shooter’ God (Vighnaharta) removed all the obstacles from our path and made it happen. Thus 2nd September fou [View Full Entry]

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Tourist’s Mumbai Our friends, Chris and Terry, a British couple, who are on a two-year round-the-world tour, landed in Mumbai in August. We had met them in Turkey when we were on our Gallipoli-Troy trip. You can’t help developing an easy friendship with like-minded people when you have traveled on the same bus, seen the same sights and heard the same anecdotes from the guide. An added common interest was blogging. We had exchanged email-ids and website-addresses when we had discovered that they too upload their travelogues on ‘travelblog.org’. Chris a [View Full Entry]

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Ajanta - a different view This was the fourth time that we were visiting Ajanta. We had seen the cave paintings first time about 36 years back, when they were in a much better state of preservation. Over the past 36 years they have deteriorated despite the efforts to conserve them and so every visit to Ajanta makes us more pensive. However, Ajanta and Ellora still work their charm on us because of their unique geological formations. We still experience the thrill that Captain John Smith must have felt when he discovered those caves hidden under thick foliage back in 1819, [View Full Entry]

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Crater Lake, Lonar The very first photo that seeded my young mind with a desire to travel and see the whole wide world, was that of Crater Lake, Oregon published in a National Geographic Magazine. I was hardly 6 years old at that time. I had to wait for about 50 years before I could partly fulfill that desire. In 1998, we had the opportunity to visit Crater Lake, Oregon. You can see my photos on the link below: http://charuavi.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/09/crater-lake-a-photoblog.htm We were lucky to visit ‘Batur crater lake’ when we visited Kintamani, Bali, Indonesia [View Full Entry]

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