Introduction In the first week of January Avi informed me that he will be attending a conference in Kyoto in February. He also magnanimously offered that I could accompany him if I wished to do so. I wasn’t exactly thrilled by this offer. In fact, I was totally dismayed. I knew that February isn’t the best time of the year to visit Japan. It will be too cold and rainy, so I did not feel very enthusiastic about the prospect of visiting Japan in February. “Don’t your conference people know better than arranging a conference in Kyoto in the midst of winter? They should have kept it during the Cherry Blossom season or better still, the Fall Foliage season. I have read that Japan is absolutely magical in those two seasons.” I said peevishly. Avi pointed ... read more

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 had mentioned the beauties of Yosemite. Avi pointed out to me that Mark Twain had died in 1910, and so his information was likely to be rather out of date. Yet, I was firm that ... read more

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 are interested only in ‘short and useful’ information, please refer to a travel guide. Vadodara, at present is a small town in Gujrat. It was the seat of princely state of Maharajah Gaekwad till 1947. What progress Vadodara has shown today is due to a very able ruler Sayajirao Gaekwad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja_Sayajirao_Gaekw... read more

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 day I turned right from our Skydome hotel, which is attached to the Rogers Center, because most of the city lay towards right and just walked about the downtown visiting Eaton Center Mall. (The Skydome ... read more

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 found us winging (no, this can’t be the correct word. It must be ‘tyring’) our way towards Daman. Daman is just 193 Km from Mumbai and the 4-lane highway is quite good, apart from a few bad patches. As we left the ... read more