Category: Travels for Fun
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FAREWELL INDIA
We were overwhelmed by the number of family members who came to the airport to bid us farewell and a safe journey home. Ravi and Minny left Gudur before dawn for a three-hour journey to the airport; Chandra, Sampath, Uma, Kumari came from afar the previous days and Usha, Santhosh, Raju and Sujatha came from Chennai. They all came to have one final chance to say goodbye. Imagine taking a six-hour round trip like Ravi and Minny did just to say farewell at the airport. We arrived to the airport early…
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ONE PHOTO, PLEASE
‘One photo, please.’ I kept hearing their voices all the time. The children asking me to take a photo of them. ‘One photo, please.’ ‘Thank you.’ And I kept thinking of all the times I was thanked for taking a photo of a child, a man or a woman. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Why were they so keen to have their photo taken? Why did they feel compelled to thank me when all I did was press the shutter release button? Andhra Pradesh was a photographer’s dream for an editorial photographer…
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KASHMIR’S LAKE DAL
Allāhu akbar! The Muslim call to prayer at dawn woke us all from our deep sleep on the houseboat. They must have a special New Year’s Day version of the call because it seemed to go on forever. It was a good alarm clock for me though as I wanted to get up at dawn and check out the lake since we arrived in the dark. From the bedroom window though I could see it was still dark as we were completely fogged in so I went back to the warm…
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SRINAGAR
We said goodbye to the Himalayas and drove a couple of hours down to Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir is a shopper’s paradise due to its carpet and textile industries so our first stop was a carpet wholesaler. Our home is already well decorated with handmade carpets from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and India but we weren’t thrilled with the carpet Padma bought a few years ago in Agra so we thought we’d have a look at some Kashmir carpets to replace it. Big…
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GULMARG
When we first made our plans to go to India last April, we decided we would leave Ammamma with family in the south while Padma, Joe, Xander and I did a bit of exploring in the north. I had been dreaming of Kashmir for 37 odd years so that was my first choice. But it would be winter there and therefore we couldn’t do any trekking. After a bit of research I discovered that Gulmarg, a hill station a couple of hours away from Srinagar is regarded as one of Asia’s…
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THE TAJ MAHAL
PHOTOBOMBING AT THE TAJ We arose early to begin a painful long journey by road to Agra and the Taj Mahal. Our travel plan called for us travelling along a modern expressway to Agra. A trip which would have been an easy three hours. But the expressway was closed due to fog as there were just too many collisions. So we went on the old road – four long hours through monochromatic dirty countryside of beeping and weaving in and out of traffic. The Taj Mahal has been photographed millions of…
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SEVA JYOTI LEPROSY REHABILITATION CENTRE
After Christmas lunch, cousin Joshua asked if we’d like to join him on a visit to a leper colony. I thought at first I was losing something in translation but indeed Joshua worked with lepers and had a scheduled visit. We drove for an hour through little villages and finally arrived at a Seva Jyoti Leprosy Rehabilitation Centre in the Nellore District. I was the first out of the car and was immediately swarmed by people who wanted to shake my hand. I shook a bunch of hands but then one…
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LOST IN TRANSLATION IN GUDUR
After the Christmas service I walked around in the courtyard and in the street and watched the people emerge. Some children saw me with the camera and asked for a photo so I took them and soon there was a queue of children all wanting photos. As soon as I would point the camera at them the children would freeze up and stand in a rigid pose. A woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a photo. I obliged and showed her the image in the camera monitor. She…
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NO WHITES IN NELLOR
Today we made an ill-fated trip to Nellor to try to do some shopping. I say ill-fated because the Christmas Eve crowds were so bad we just couldn’t get anything done. We went into a clothes store and this manikin proved to be the closest I had come to seeing a white person in 10 days since leaving the Hyderabad airport. This area of India simply doesn’t attract tourists or hardly any people of other countries. In fact we haven’t even seen Chinese or other Asians here. This is about as…
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