Let me begin by wishing you a very happy new year. May your dreams take wings in 2011!
I suffered from severe writer’s block for last two months of 2010 and left this space hardly updated. Some photography assignments and a few other things I was working on kept me occupied, which means I also did very little reading online, rarely visited blogs or kept myself updated with happenings in the online-world. However, I managed to keep paintedstork facebook page updated regularly.
I normally do not take the trouble to make new year resolutions—they get broken anyway—and it is no different for 2011. But at this moment, I am hoping to keep this space active at least for the next few months. Let me begin with stories from a visit to Bharatpur’s Keoladeo National Park in November 2010, recounting my encounters with the beautiful birds in the park.
In the three days that I spent in Bharatpur, I hardly saw any rare or exotic birds except for a pair of Sarus Cranes. But I could observe many common species from a close distance and cherished watching their behavior. The most common birds in the park were perhaps rose ringed parakeets that chattered loudly in the trees all through the day in every corner of the park. The rarest among the birds I saw were a pair of black necked storks and a pair of sarus cranes.
The first birds I saw in the park were Brahminy Mynas in a small gathering, followed by jungle babblers in their typical group of five to six. Soon after getting past the entrance, I was excited to see a peafowl family with five chicks foraging in the shrubs. There was further excitement ahead as I spotted two jackals shying away into the jungle and watched a parakeet trying to threaten an enemy hiding in a tree hallow.
The first of the birds that posed happily for my camera were laughing doves. There were plenty of them in Bharatpur. Early morning and evenings, a careful listener could hear the sound of their laughter filling the air. They were also happy to pose for the camera and did not run away at the first sight of a telephoto lens. I first saw a lone laughing dove sitting on the top of a bush. It sat there gracefully until I took a few pictures, but decided to fly away on seeing an approaching vehicle.
Laughing Dove
Half-an-hour later, I saw a pair of doves walking slowly at the edge of the tarmac road that bisects the park. They seemed wary of me, but did not feel threatened as long as I kept my distance. They hopped slowly along the shoulder of the road, occasionally picking whatever they found worth gulping. I lay down on the ground to get an eye-level picture, but they did not seem to like me doing that and decided to walk away from me. A little later, one of them sat on the lowest branch of a bush, started preening and at the same time generously posing for me. I was more than happy to go on clicking it displaying the colourful feathers.
A laughing dove showing off its feathers!
Coming up next: more birds from Bharatpur.
Here is wishing you a very very happy year ahead. May 2011 be full of happiness and bring in a lot of memorable journeys to you.
Here is the desktop calendar wallpaper for January 2011 – image of an egret from Keoladeo National Park, Bharatpur. Get it for your desktop – 1280×800 or 1024×768
Let me begin with wishing you Happy Holidays. I hope you are somewhere in some beautiful place or on the way as I am writing this and will get to read this post only after a week.. 🙂
This is the time to look back at the year that is about to go past and then forget it – to look back once to recall all the good things and bad, and allow both of them to get washed away from memory forever and begin afresh without shackles of the past.
I consciously did not travel much in 2010 and instead focussed on streamlining my work in photography and travel. I am seeing some fruits of this effort already and the days ahead look much better. Here is a quick summary of my journeys and images in 2010. I am going nowhere in this year-end travel season, so it is safe to list them now, knowing fully well that there is nothing more to add!
The temple at Devarayanadurga
I have posted 160 stories here on India Travel Blog in 2010, which approximates to a story every other day. A lot of them are images and photo-stories but there are plenty of long travelogues as well. If I remember correctly, the first travel of 2010 was a short drive out of Bangalore to Devarayanadurga and Madhugiri Fort. It was memorable trip of driving out early in the morning in the winter chill and discovering some beautiful wilderness and hills north of Bangalore.
Bhoganandeeshwara Temple
I made a few more journeys in and around Bangalore later in the year, which included a visit to Manchanabele Dam, one to Nandi Hills and Bhoganandeeshwara Temple at the base of the hill and a day-trip to see the Mysore Palace in all its glory during Dasara Celebrations.
I also managed to go to a few beautiful places within Bangalore that I had never visited earlier but always wanted to see, like the Freedom Park and Tipu Sultan’s Palace. Not that you can call it traveling, but the visits were worth mentioning. Over the last few years, I had considerably cut down on short drives from the city and had been travelling to farther places. But there were many day-trips and two to three-day visits out of Bangalore this year.
A foggy Wayanad
Foggy hills of Chikmagalur during the monsoons
One such weekend trip was to Wayanad in March, escaping from the quickly increasing temperatures of Bangalore to cooler climes where it was still foggy and cold. And later in July in the middle of the monsoons, I made another trip to fog-enveloped Chikmagalur where we never saw the sun for three full days.
A sambar deer in Kanha National Park
Slopes of Sikkim
As for longer trips, I spent four days in Kerala visiting Thrissur on the day of Thrissur Pooram and continuing further to Trivandrum. I was in Trivandrum to work on a story and had dreaded the April heat, but thankfully it was raining there and I spent three pleasant days in the city. Later in June, I spent five days in the wilderness of Kanha National Park where I thoroughly enjoyed the company of wildlife. A quick but memorable trip to Sikkim happened in October. Last month, I made another wildlife trip to Bharatpur National Park followed by a visit to Dharamsala – two places I had been wanting to visit for a very long time. That was pretty much my year of travel, besides some journeys made on work and strictly work, which included a short trip to Ooty and Hassan, and a long trip to Mathura.
Buddhist icons at Dharamsala
Once again, happy holidays to you. I hope 2010 was a good year for you and so will the the coming days will be.
Prints of all the images available. Request for prints.