Kerala - God's own country: Part 3

We set out for Aleppey (Alappuzha for the Mallu purists) at dawn the very next day (Sunday, 14th March 2009). This time round, Adrian, a friend from the client side came with us as well. We used the same taxi we went to Athirappilly in, thanks to the marvel of technology that is the mobile phone. The mobile phone has done to commerce what Twenty20 has done to cricket - instant gratification guaranteed!

By the way, the taxi driver had a rather memorable name - Romeo, but as far as Mallu names went, one felt it was significantly lacking in imagination and that sense of debonair abandon that mallu parents have while inflicting some unsuspecting kid with a name worth regretting! Romeo can count himself lucky not to be saddled with something like "Lijeemon Samuel", "Bobbilikumar Thettachan" or "Pearlymol Vadakkeparambil". People who know me are apt to say, "You are one for commenting on others names, Rangarajan Vijayaraghavan", but believe me, I mention these names out of a purely kindred spirit :) . For a much better description of South Indian names, readers are directed to a much more famous blog post!

All said and done, Romeo was a good driver, though more of the "What the racetracks of Monza lost Kochi has gained" school of driving than the "Slow and steady wins the race" school. Effectively, he ensured that we reached Aleppey in about an hour. We saw some interesting sights on the way, including a brokerage firm with a name designed to combat the worst of recessions:

Morgan Sachs International Brokerage House Limited

(now that's original!)

We also saw a juvenile elephant, looking rather contemplative, being transported by a tempo and about a million bridges over backwaters along the way. We reached Aleppey at about 7.15 AM and read a sign-board that said "To the beach", much to our surprise. While our research had thrown up plenty of results on the backwater cruises, no one ever seemed to have mentioned the beach. Still, we headed to the beach, with minimal expectations. We were in for a surprise - not only was the beach quite large, but clean, picturesque and empty as well! Here's a little sample

Btw, all the above pictures and any other ones I may post about the Aleppey trip were taken by Abhay from his Nokia E70 camera (thanks to my camera resting safely with the Canon Care Center by then) - now that's a truly versatile phone! Of course, due credit to Abhay's photography skills as well :)

Adrian, Abhay and I had a good time walking along the beach, watching crabs, clams and other forms of marine life as well as a really funny bird family running around at the edges of the beach looking for a tasty snack. It was hilarious to watch them running spiritedly after a receding wave, with alert eyes on the lookout for the next meal, and running back hurriedly as the next wave came in. Better seen than described though!

We then had our breakfast at a nearby restaurant and soon left for the backwater cruise. We reached the backwaters by around 10.30 and spent some time looking around the area for some houseboats.

More about the houseboats in the next post :-)

Kerala : God's Own Country - Part 2

Abhay and I looked around for a suitable place for a skinny dip and a couple of deliciously cool dips in the water and some pictures later, we  soon made our way from near the top of the waterfall through a paved pathway leading donwards to the base. We made our way through a clump of bamboo to reach a bunch of rocks at the base (towards the northern edge) of the falls. There was a rope barrier towards the end of these rocks to prevent people from getting into the water but we had good fun, hopping towards the edge nimbly and soaking in the scene close-up.

The view from the base was MAGNIFICENT! The spray was so strong that  we could feel ourselves enveloped in a wet, white curtain some 50 feet away from the actual falls. And to boot, it sounded like we were inside an aircraft engine. We headed a bit further away from the falls to get a more central view (instead of the side-on view that we had been getting so far). We found a nice big rock that promised a fantastic front-on view and quickly clambered up - we were not disappointed. When you get a view like this, there ain't much more you can ask for!

But the joy was short lived. A septuagenarian dressed in khaki gestured frantically at us from the river bank and ordered us to climb down. We were apparently beyond the borders of the limits set by the rope barrier. We took a couple of hasty pictures from the top and made our way down. But it was going to take more than an old watchman to drag us away from such vantage points. We soon found another rock to perch on (this time within the rope boundary) and enjoyed the cool spray that was on offer for quite a while. Then, we called it a day rather reluctantly and headed back up, enthralled by what we had experienced

We soon headed further upstream, to a place called Vazhachal (again on the same Chalakudy river), known for its waterfalls again. However, these were not as much of a spectacle as the Athirappilly falls and we started walking further upstream in search of better sights and sounds. And it was in the course of this search that I had the misfortune of losing balance and falling into the water - camera, mobile phone, watch and all! The camera promptly coughed and died, whereas my trusty Nokia got all fogged up but worked feebly. Thankfully, the watch was still fine. A rather damp end to a fantastic morning I thought. Gloomily, Abhay and I headed back to Kochi after letting these gadgets dry out in the sun for a while. We reached back at around 3 pm 

After having some lunch and going to give my camera to be fixed at the nearest Canon service center, we decided to head out to the harbour and try our luck with a sunset cruise. Turned out, we weren't that lucky! It became overcast in the evening and tourists cancelled any cruise plans they might have had and occupied themselves with the simple joys of sipping tea by the harbour. Reluctantly, we were forced to head back that evening, disappointed. 

Things took a turn for the better that evening as we made plans to head out to Aleppey the next day. After doing some research and consulting with Adrian (our resident client-side tourist in Kerala :)) , we hit the sack, preparing ourselves mentally for another early morning start and looking forward to the backwater experience. As we were to find out, a truly unforgettable experience was in store. 

Rest in next

Kerala : God's Own Country - Part 1

Had the good fortune of being sent to Kochi on a project recently. While I have been to "God's own country" twice before (once to Shoranur to catch a train back to IIMA - you can find details about the trip here; and once to Kovalam on a company Offsite) , this is the first time I stayed there for an extended period. And now I am in a position to say that the epithet is richly deserved :)

For starters, the client office was right next to the harbour and I got to see some fantastic sunsets day after day from the window. Here's a little sample


Naturally , could not just stop at just soaking in the sights and sounds of Kochi alone. So, called over another colleague, Abhay [due thanks to Abhay for taking the above pic!]and we went gallivanting through Kochi and some neighbouring places over a wonderful weekend.

First came Athirappilly Estate, a sleepy estate around 70 kilometers from Kochi full of lush bamboo forests, rubber plantations and palm/coconut trees but perhaps better known for its waterfalls. Mani Ratnam has an ongoing love affair with these waterfalls, by the way, having used them in two rather memorable scenes in "Dil Se" [Jiya Jale] and Guru [Barso Re]. And if I may say so, Mani Ratnam seems to ba a man of good taste :D.

Our enchantment started with the approach road to Athirappilly itself - winding, serene and rather oddly, lined with newly built bungalows [thanks no doubt to the booming Middle Eastern economy and the sizeable remittances from "mellus" in the "Gelf"]. Soon afterwards, the houses faded out, to be replaced by more lush plantations (including the quintessential banana plantations) and the odd toddy shop along the way.

Shortly, we reached a 'check post' - our entrance into Athirappilly estate. It had rained there and the smell of earth that had recently slaked its thirst was palpable. The road started climbing again and the twists, turns and mini-bridges that are the hallmarks of Ghat Roads began to manifest themselves eagerly.

We soon reached the entrance to the falls, got ourselves entry tickets and hurriedly made our way downhill towards the falls. The distant roar of the cascading waters and the coordinated chirping of the birds in the forest fed us a primal feast of natural music that left us asking for more. [We were quite early to get up and push off to Athirappilly as well, so not too many people were there at that time, making the atmosphere even more serene]

We reached the falls and were greeted with a sight for sore eyes. There was a surprisingly large quantum of water flowing for this time of the year (March), augmented no doubt, by the recent rain. The entrance to the falls from the ticket counter actually opens out close to the top of the falls, where you can see the Chalakkudi river eagerly heading downhill, only to find a little wall of rock about forty feet tall to be navigated. And navigate it does, with great glee. The river breaks into two main sections and empties itself into a couple of dents in the rock face barely more than 10 feet wide and thunders down the wall of rock in a grand cavalcade of furious water droplets fighting for space in a race to reach the bottom first.

More pictures and details to follow :-)

The Iron Fort

Have you ever got the feeling that your life is just passing you by randomly, without any direction whatever? That there is a larger purpose to your existence than mere day-to-day prestidigations in front of the computer? That there is something out there that is calling out to you more persistently than an ICICI bank Credit Card Seller?

One of the things I feel very strongly about is a healthy work-life balance. Balancing these two different spheres requires a great degree of determination, especially on the 'life' front (your office will ensure that you pay sufficient attention to work!). One of my ways of having a good "life" is to explore nature - go on treks, take pictures, go running. etc. And the monsoons are a lovely time of the year to do that, especially in and around Mumbai. Couple with this the fact that I have not been trekking since April (that wonderful Gangtok Visit) and you know the reason behind my introductory paragraph

Thanks this feeling of 'not having been among the great outdoors' going at my vitals like a persistent woodpecker, and more importantly, thanks to Vix (photos to be found here) , who moved my from my lethargy through an inspirational gtalk session, we both planned a trek to this fort near Lonavla called Lohagadh.

A write-up of the rather interesting trek follows, but in the meanwhile, you can find some pictures from the trip here

Cheers,
Ranga

A Consultant's life - Part V

Just discovered how to paste HTML code onto blogs directly. Thought I would start off by putting one of my favourite pictures from the recent Gangtok trip


Without HTML pasting, putting up pictures on the blog is one hell of a pain. Every time I want to insert a picture, it goes and sits right at the top of the article! Is there any way around this predicament?

A Consultant's life - Part III

Yes, Consultants do have 'lives' ;-), especially when they get time off to refresh themselves with some well earned leave! Yours truly went on a trip to Darjeeling and Gangtok recently - Paradise found!

I shall be uploading a more detailed travel write-up shortly, but in the meanwhile, the interested reader can check out some photos here.

PS: The not so interested reader can stifle his/her yawns :-)

Heaven is green in colour - Part IV

It has been a very very long time since I updated my Blog with something written.... my previous post and the current post being two halves of the same literary effort - a direct result of the suppressed writer in me bursting at the seams, so here goes...

The Madgaon station was a modern station and was very elegantly designed - not like your usual early 1900's, about-to-collapse-at-any-time kind of station but large and imposing and most importantly, clean! We halted for nearly half an hour there but yours truly was disappointed to find that they sold absolutely no newspaper worth reading (for someone who has been brought up reading the Hindu, the TOI doesn't even remotely come into that category - I can write more about this but the transgression would be unwarranted).

Soon we were off again, chugging into the western ghats with only the grey of the clouds above and the green of the valleys and plains below to give the train company. Outside, not a soul could be seen for miles and miles. Not that we were looking out all the time though. We spent almost the whole of the morning, afternoon and evening playing cards, cards and more cards.

Ah the Game of Cards! There is an interesting topic if ever there was one... what is so fundamentally attractive about manipulating your fortunes against the laws of probability is something I am unable to figure out. Of course, not being good at playing any of these card games makes me unfit to comment on the charms of finding that one have a full hand or can go trumps or whatever. So I will leave that to the judgement of people more suited to the kind of mental make up that card games require.

I remember playing a game called 'Donkey' which required me to keep track of how many cards in each suit have been played. Shashu, our resident playing card expert and Suhas, another of our experts, could keep track of it with the most amazing ease... But I dont know why it was so difficult for me to have an abacus kind of setup in my mind that would increment the cards played of each suit as and when dealt with. Hmm...something worth pondering about. I need to have a more 'shoe-box' kind of mind that can compartmentalise information simultaneously and process them in parallel.

Bottom line is that I was absolutely hopeless at it and it was the most remarkable piece of luck that I was able to manage to avoid becoming Donkey all the time. To add to my already extant confusion, I was constantly distracted by the mind-numbing scenery that was whistling past my window pane - green here, green there, green everywhere; the only places on the ground that were not green were a muddy-red-brown -- pools or streams of water caused by the incessantly glorious rains that accompanied us throughout the journey.

Of course, the ghat section was another treat to the eyes. It was either raining or had just recently rained throughout the section. We were faced with majestically rising rock faces on one side coloured a deep, glistening grey and an undulating slope dying away into a river or a stream on the other... stunning to say the least. Of course there was the added attraction of seeing the train screech into a tunnel every few minutes.

There is something fascinating about trains entering and exiting tunnels which I am unable to put into words. I remember reading many Enid Blyton books in my childhood where she describes trains whistling and screeching their way through tunnels and, predictably enough, describing situations where kids get into and the most amazing tight spots imaginable! At the end of it all, I was thrilled every time we entered a tunnel and even more thrilled to look back and see the last bogies of the train trail us as we exited. I had taken a couple of pictures of the train coming out of the tunnel (posted them sometime back) and the pics looked ethereal to say the least!

Well, time progressed and we kept playing, eating and admiring the scenery over and over again. soon it was becoming dark and we finally broke off cards for the day, had dinner and settled down for a lazy night. Again, yours truly started nodding off by around 10 PM, much to the amusement of Kela and Shashu, who were actually talking to me about my phenomenal capacity to sleep off at a particular time irrespective of what was happening around me. There have been incidents of that sort in my first year here so far. But second year seems to have taken its toll on me. I find that I am able to stay awake easily till 12 -12.30 AM nowadays. After that it is a bit of a fight though :)

Again a strange thing regarding my sleep patterns is that I find it much easier to stay awake when I am amongst friends, chatting away on arbit things in life. I also find it easier to stay awake when there is a team deadline near at hand and I have to work under severe time pressure. There is an adrenaline rush to be had from trying to structure your thoughts quickly to meet the deadline! Nothing like having your favourite music playing in the background at that point of time either!

The next day dawned bright and fine and we were nearing dear old Amdavad...we still had two plus hours of waking time to be spent inside the train and I will give you four options as to what we might have done
a) play cards
b) play cards
c) play cards
d) play cards

:D

Finally, we landed up at the station and after an uneventful but bone jarring journey in a mass of metal that the owner has the gall to call an 'autorickshaw' we made it in one piece to the campus and life in the fifth term was about to start in full swing for us...

I wrote something about wanting to avoid commenting more on the TOI for it being an unwarranted transgression....but as it panned out, the entire blog entry has been a series of such deviations. Can't help it though. I simply had to let myself go today....

Blogging off,
Ranga

Heaven is green in colour - Part III

This time round, my journey was well provided for in terms of home food. So was Kela's. Mothers are so optimistic about their children's eating capabilities! As a result, we knew that we did not have to worry about food till we reached Ahmedabad, a day and a half later.

Our train was supposed to start from Shoranur at 10.15 pm or so. Wonder of wonders, it managed to start from the station at 10.30! My first surprise came from knowing that a couple of our batchmates were also travelling in the same coach. The next day, I also came to know that the train was choc-a-bloc with my Mallu batchmates. Still, we sojourners in AS1 stuck together like glue for the rest of the journey.

As expected, there was no significant activity till next morning and yours truly had a dreamy night, filled with banana leaves, floating teacups and oddly enough, cell phones. The four of us got up next morning and decided we would pass time by playing cards. Now, I suck at card games but gamely decided to give them a try, for want of a better way of spending group time. Soon I realised that my self awareness was 100% accurate, as I kept dropping count of the cards that had done the rounds. Some memory trick is desperately needed, I think.

My concentration on the game in hand was no way helped by the stunning scenery that was on show through the window. Often, I used to let my jaw drop at the greenery outside and lost the trend even more easily. It was highly exasperating for my fellow players, but I could not help it. I was like a man in the desert who had just sighted an oasis. This was literally true in my case, with Trichy experiencing a tough couple of years monsoon-wise. The greenery was nothing new for my Mallu friends, but then, a fish doesn't know the value of water unless it is actually out of it!

It was quite early in the morning when we entered Goa and halted at a station called Madgaon. Very quaint location. I could see a few old buildings and a church as well on the other side. Goa is famous for its multitude of churches and I could see some of that famous charm in this one's architecture too. The best part about the trip was that we were travelling through some parts of the country that were pretty much devoid of even a remotely urban settlement. All we saw on our way were thatched / tiled roofs glistening wet in the drizzle that was our constant companion throughout.

Heaven is green in colour - Part II

It was the 3rd of September and time had come for me to leave Trichy (ahh...dear old Trichy - my hometown! The best part of this visit was that I actually saw WATER flowing over the Cauvery riverbed probably for the second time in 5 years).

I was to board the Trivandrum-Jodhpur express at Shoranur (Kerala), for which I first needed to go to Coimbatore. I took the Jan Shatabdi express, which by the way, is one of the better trains running in Tamil Nadu, if not in India. The seats were extremely comfortable for one of my inconsiderable bulk, though I wonder whether some of my more dimensionally challenged acquaintances would have liked them. Still, the train took off and I was there, curled up with a nice book in hand, lazily reading through and also enjoying the greenery whooshing past me. In fact, a part of the journey was along the banks of the Cauvery and it was a very soothing experience, almost preparing me for the paradise that was about to invade my senses.

Fourand a half hours and a nice home-packed breakfast later, I was in Coimbatore waiting at the railway station waiting for my dormmate Kela (I really don't bother remembering his original name nowadays :-)) to come and pick me up. And come he did, and we zipped off to his home in his Dad's car. I was again treated to a nice lunch there...the pleasures of home-cooked food are beyond description. And, as befits a sumptuous lunch, I dozed off only to wake up an hour later, realising that we were late and had to rush to catch the passenger train from Coimbatore to Shoranur. However, we managed to reach there in time only to find that the all the available seating space was already occupied. We were optimistic about our chances of getting a seat and decided to rough it out initially by standing - not a big deal for people who have been in Mumbai Metros, but still wholly unexpected.

For those who haven't been to that side of the country, Tamil Nadu is by and large an arid region with little rainfall coming its way past the ghats of Kerala. And Kerala (it markets itself as "God's own Country" - I see very little reason to disagree :-)) is like the repository of all the greenery that iss missing in Tamil Nadu. During our train trip, we could literally see the physical disparity between the states materialising before our eyes. There we were, chugging along some plains with half-arid, bushy vegetation one minute and the next minute we were transported to another world where teak forests and eucalyptus trees ruled supreme. We were thinking that the person who drew the boundary sure had a good sense of humour. I think he must have been a Keralite. Even the rain gods seemed to recognise the divide. There was one bridge near which there was a board with the writing "Welcome to Kerala" on one side and "Welcome to Tamil Nadu" on the other. I swear only one side of that board was wet.

The journey into Kerala continued and we were admiring the scenery, and polishing off some groundnuts in the meantime. Finally, some benevolent souls alighted at some station and we managed to squeeze into a luggage rack on top of one of the seating areas. We even managed to get a couple of cups of tea on top. It was an awesome experience to sip tea, chat and chug along. Soon, Shoranur beckoned...

Heaven is green in colour!

I, along with some other batchmates, came back after the fourth term break by rail from Shoranur(in Kerala) to Ahmedababad. The journey was through the Konkan Railways route, which undoubtedly is the most scenic railway route I have had the fortune to travel by so far. I will attempt a description in words in my next post, but first I am posting some pics taken