Blogs from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, Asia - page 2

Blog # 7. Sunday, March 3, 2019. Earning our stripes in Tadoba, then Mumbai and back home. Dear family, friends and colleagues, Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing OK. We have come to the end of our five week India odyssey. This is the last blog of a trip that was one year in the planning. As usual, we have had a fantastic time. The highlight of the whole trip for me was undoubtedly this past six days. You can guess why. Wild animals. I’m talking sloth bears, wild dogs, a rare black leopard, various deer and birds and – most significantly of all – magnificent tigers! A life-long wish come true to see tigers in the wild. Tigers are endangered and elusive, and for me it was a race against time to see ... read more

The night before I had been thinking, try as we might we cannot conform a trip’s purpose to its actuality. I might want this trip to be spiritual or a trip where I meet a lot of fun people, but so far that’s not it. Maybe this trip will be setting myself small yet difficult tasks and accomplishing them. This could be a range of things such as walking across beeping rivers of traffic, eating at adventurous cafes, maybe even surviving a Krishna brainwash could count. Or today’s task: navigating Mumbai’s commuter rail system. Up in the suburbs it isn’t really practical to take a taxi all the way to the tip of Colaba where the Gateway to India and other tourist attractions are located. If I wanted to go I would have to take a ... read more

I visited Doha a year back, many of my family and friends were skeptical about the travel because of the mindset we share about the country as being too conservative or unsafe. I did read up everything possible online before making the trip, and considered myself sufficiently warned on dressing and generally being respectful and mindful of the locals. On reaching Doha, I realized my perception had been too harsh. Doha is no different from UAE, and the people there can be warm and understanding. The country has survived and been through a lot, fighting against much stronger contenders, and despite that it has sustained itself. Day one I started my tour of the lovely city with the famous market area, Souq Waqif. Souq traditionally means marketplace and is generally a prominent and buzzing center of ... read more

Chapter 1- Introduction Hi guys you know my name is Mrinank Bhattacharjee, I am a 10 years old author and all that stuff. But I am not going to talk about this boring introduction, I am going to tell you a story about my first snow. So hold your hearts, here we start. Chapter 2- Flight of the north Our flight was at 9:00am. It was a jet airways and I slept in the first 1st hour of the flight. I woke up and ate my breakfast and watched the movie (Tiger Zinda Hai). We reached Chandigarh around 11:00am. We sat in a car and we ate lunch in a veg restaurant. Then we left for our hotel in Kullu- AppleValley. Chapter 3- Kullu Tired and hungry we were bored in the car so we watched ... read more

We had earmarked today to visit Elephanta Island, but David was not feeling his best and Sara realised that as it’s Diwali, the crowds were likely to be worse than usual. As the trip was going to involve five hours or more in the open sun, with a lot of walking and 2 hours of choppy rides on the ferry, we decided to give it a miss. The size of the queues for the ferry more than vindicated our decision! Instead, we walked south from the hotel into Colaba, a small peninsula in the very south of Mumbai. At 8.30 it was very peaceful, with empty roads and none of the shops open. We passed affluent house and hotels fronting onto the harbour, then headed down the main road. The map showed an area of docks, ... read more