Reaper1991

What is herping ? It's the act of searching for reptiles or amphibians. Its derived the same way as Herpetology which is the study of amphibians and replies ("herpein" in Greek means "to creep"). Sounds boring ? You will be surprised by how exciting it can be. How did I come about this ? Well my friend from pre-university college, Ashwin had visited the Amboli Herping camp the previous year and had posted some amazing shots of green vine snakes, frogs and so on which caught my attention since I love macro photography. I had inquired about the same the previous year too but had not been able to make the trip. This year I decided that before I moved to US, I had to do this and asked Nitin to join me. He agreed and ... read more

"Wow, how have you not visited the Taj Mahal being in India ?" is the first reaction you get from most of the people when they get to know that you have not visited it yet. It sure is something to be ticked off by any proud Indian but I guess there are a lot of people who are in the same bucket. So was I until ....... When Abhishek Verma, one of my work mentors announced his marriage, all former teammates started making our plans to attend this much awaited wedding. When you travel that far, you might as well tick off a few places of interest from your bucket list and that is exactly what we decided to do. Initially, Nikhil suggested Nag Tibba trek as an option and as with any event, the ... read more

Amit was finally getting married. He had spent sleepless nights thinking about marriage and had even made this his ultimate goal a few months back. So, when a colleague achieves his topmost goal and invites you to attend his marriage 1800 km from your location, what do you do ? Accept the mission and be ready to travel, party, dance, eat and explore. It was a sudden revelation for most of the people (my ex-team is notorious for that) when Amit dropped us an email saying that he was engaged along with the invitation for his marriage. A few of us decided to attend his marriage and started thinking of the arrangements. Amit was extremely excited that we had decided to join him on his momentous occasion and made a host of arrangements to ensure we ... read more

Revisiting the heritage run series, Badami was my second of the Heritage runs organized by GoUNESCO. This was an upgrade from the 15 km run to a half marathon distance of 21 kms. Though Nitin was supposed to join me for this, he fell ill in the last moment and I was left to go solo on this. It was ironic since the previous time to Coorg, I had to cancel after registering since I had an injury just a week prior to the run. Nonetheless, I was high on enthusiasm after completing my comeback half marathon in Bangalore just the previous week. I booked the bus to Badami along with the stay and got ready to explore Badami. I reached the bus stand around 8 in the morning of 22nd October. My hotel, Rajsangam International ... read more

A trip with the promise of a views of a beautiful hill station, a 15 km run and a chance to sharpen my photography skills. Three of my favourite hobbies and how could you say no to that ? I read about GoHeritage runs while browsing through the run events in India. I was intrigued and decided to check it out. I found out that GoHeritage runs were started by GoUNESCO, a group funded by UNESCO to increase the awareness of heritage sites. They had hosted a number of runs at Heritage sites in India previously and I thought I should give it a shot this time. It being in Ooty just made it all the more compelling as Ooty is one of the very popular hill stations of South India and I had not previously ... read more