After considering several options, we finally narrowed down to a 2 day trip, covering the following places: Dubare, Pollibetta, Talakaveri, Bhagamandala, Igguthappa temple, Nalknad palace and Chelavara falls.

We left at 6am in the morning and stopped for Thatte Idly near Bidadi (Bangalore Mysore road).

We then headed towards Dubare via the Ranganathittu->Hunsur->Kushalnagar road. We reached Dubare at around 11am. In my last trip, I couldn’t see the elephants, as we had reached this place at 12:30. We were met with disappointment this time too. We were told that one of the elephants was sick and they had let all the elephants back to the jungle. (I recently read in the news that seven elephants were killed – most of them in Dubare due to lack of vets). For people visiting to see the elephants – make sure you are there by 9.

We spent some time here and then went to Siddapura. The route to Siddapura and the surrounding places is quite scenic – everywhere you go, you see places filled with greenery. You get to see coffee and pepper estates everywhere. These places are green throughout the year.

Once at Siddapura, we had lunch in a small Udupi hotel near the bus-stand and headed to Pollibetta. There is a Tata estate on top of Pollibetta and with some luck you get to go around – unfortunately we were not lucky and met with our second disappointment for the day. The trip seemed to be a flop with 2 disappointments early on.

We headed to Virajpet via Ammathi. We checked into a small lodge over there. We had not made prior bookings in the hope of finding something – so we didn’t want to wait until the night. We also enquired about Chelavara Falls. We had to book a 4-wheel jeep since these places are tough to go on our Indica. Luckily, we got a person who was ready to take us there the next day for Rs.1200/-. He said he will cover Igguthappa temple, Nalknad palace and Chelavara falls by noon.

Off we went to Talakaveri. This is the birth place of river Cauvery (Kaveri). We reached there just in time. The temple and the place is closed at 6:00pm and we were there at 5:30. We prayed and then climbed to the hilltop. It was foggy – and the landscape was changing every few minutes as the clouds passed by us. It was drizzling slightly – adding excitement to the pleasant weather.

After satisfying ourselves with snaps, we came down to Bhagamandala – this was one part of the trip where we met with really heavy rain. We went to the temple, prayed and then headed back to our car. Bhagamandala is just 8km down the hill from Talakaveri.

The road that we took from Virajpet to Talakaveri, went via Napoklu – and there were certain places where the road was extremely narrow. So we didn’t want to take chances on the way back as it was getting dark. Our driver enquired and found out another route back and we decided to take that.

The road back was extremely exciting – it was pitch dark, there was slight drizzle, and we could hear the thunders rumbling in the sky. To add to the excitement, we were taking a new route – so our GPS could only give us a sense of direction, but otherwise couldn’t help us to drive back to our destination. It seemed like we were heading back in the right direction, but we were quite far from the route we had taken. We were driving parallel to it, but there was no indication as to where we will meet that route. Also, there was hardly anyone on the roads and the few people who we met on the way, just asked us to go on. Sometimes we had to head back a few meters and take an alternative route.

We reached a small village close to Virajpet on the way back. It was already past 8pm and we saw that most shops and hotels were closed. We bought a few biscuits and headed back to Virajpet – hoping that someone would have some sympathy on us and serve us hot food. Luckily there was one hotel open! There was no power when we reached, but the hotel had a generator. We had ghee rice and paratha and then went back to our lodge and hit the sack.

Day 2 experience will be updated soon (will cover Igguthappa temple, Nalknad palace, Chelavara falls and an unplanned visit to Iruppu falls and Nagarahole National Park).

The complete photoset of the trip to Coorg can be seen here.

If you liked this, you may also like

• July 6, 2010 — Trip to Mandalpatti, Madikeri, Dubare and Bylakuppe
• March 3, 2010 — Sunset at Sankey Tank
• February 28, 2010 — An evening in Lalbagh
• February 9, 2010 — Trip to Turahalli, Chudahalli, Agara and Begur
• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• June 14, 2009 — Early morning in Lalbagh
• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights
• June 2, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Be there!
• May 23, 2009 — Trips to Ranganathittu, Varthur lake and Sankey Tank

We started at about 6 in the morning and went to Madikeri. We stopped a few times on the way to click snaps.

We left to Mandalpatti post lunch. Mandalpatti is known for its scenic beauty and is close to Abbey Falls.

Unfortunately this is not a good time to visit unless what you are looking for is an adventure. We were not prepared for what we were about to encounter. There are 2 routes to Mandalpatti – one which shares its route with Abbey Falls, the other which goes via Makkandur. The route via Makkandur is a bit longer but I would easily advise it over the other. The first route is extremely treacherous and there were quite a few places where the road was slushy causing the car to skid and scrape over moderately huge stones. The roads are very narrow and there were small water streams across the road. We had to stop several times to avoid brake-shoe or engine overheating.

It took us almost a quarter tank of fuel to reach the top – since we had to drive mostly on the first gear. We hardly got out of our car except when we had to direct the vehicle to allow other passing vehicles or when we stopped to give the car a rest, but inspite of the short time, 2 of us managed to get leech bites. It was a very tense drive. As you approach the top, the huge trees disappear and you see vast open grasslands. This basically means there is nothing stopping the winds and it made it all the more difficult to steer the car. The visibility was extremely poor and we could hardly see beyond 10-20 feet. We stopped the car on top and got out and were welcomed by a gush of heavy wind and rain – it was no use having an umbrella. We could not get any snaps on top. We could hardly see anything because of the fog. We couldn’t stay for long as it was getting late and the weather was really bad and we had to return.

We returned via the Makkandur route. This route is extremely scenic and the roads are way better than the other route. All in all, it was a good experience because of the scenic routes. I would definitely want to visit this place again – but it is better to take a four-wheel jeep or go in the summers.

We went back to our hotel, had dinner and called it a day.

The next morning we got up early and went to Raja’s seat which was right next to the hotel. The fog was playing hide and seek and we got a few snaps of the landscape. We also got a few macro shots of flowers, plants and sparrows.

We met a very enthusiastic person named Shiva. Shiva has been doing photography for a very long time and has traveled around. He noticed us clicking the snap of the droplet and gave us some good advice. He described some of his own experiences as a photographer. The most important takeaway: “Feel the place first, then you will know what to click”.

We then headed to Dubare Elephant Camp. It was a bit late by the time we reached – the elephants are left into the jungle at 12:30 and it was already 12:30. So we decided to go white water rafting. Dubare is not known for the white water rafting, so I didn’t have high hopes. But it turned out to be better than I had expected. We saw a tusker on the way. Our guide made the whole experience worthwhile. There were 3 rafts – and there was some competition between the rafts – we splashed water at each other, bumped into each others’ rafts, and raced in the river. We were made to hit hard at trees, hitting rocks, going below very low tree branches etc. We also jumped into the river and swam. There was a huge chameleon in the water and our guide took it and wore it on top of his helmet reminding me of Madagascar. There it lay motionless until our guide took it and dropped it on some tree branch. There were 4 rapids and I would now say it is worth the experience – not for the rapids but generally for the fun ride. Unfortunately, I don’t have any snaps as we couldn’t carry a camera during rafting.

We had lunch in Dubare, and then headed to Chiklihole Reservoir. The route was extremely scenic and it reminded me of the route to B. R. Hills. It is about 6km from Dubare Elephant Camp – on the way back, at about 3km from Dubare you will see a diversion to the left and its about 3km from there.

There was slight drizzle and the weather was awesome. The light was low, so the scenic landscape was only for the eyes – and extremely tough to capture.

Our final stop before we came back to Bangalore was Bylakuppe – Golden Temple. I had already been to Golden Temple last year, so I thought I will try something different this time with photography – I decided to click macros and portraits. We stopped on the way to experience the scenery. It was wonderful.

It was 1:30 by the time I reached home. We were exhausted.

The full Coorg Trip photo set is over here.

If you liked this, you may also like

• July 19, 2010 — Trip to Dubare, Pollibetta, Talakaveri, Bhagamandala
• March 3, 2010 — Sunset at Sankey Tank
• February 28, 2010 — An evening in Lalbagh
• February 9, 2010 — Trip to Turahalli, Chudahalli, Agara and Begur
• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• June 14, 2009 — Early morning in Lalbagh
• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights
• June 2, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Be there!
• May 23, 2009 — Trips to Ranganathittu, Varthur lake and Sankey Tank

Here are the steps:

1. We first start by creating an SVG template file called wall-tmpl.svg with the following contents and saving it in the Wallpapers directory (let’s say it is ~/Theme/Wallpapers):
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd" [
<!ENTITY ns_imrep "http://ns.adobe.com/ImageReplacement/1.0/">
<!ENTITY ns_svg "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<!ENTITY ns_xlink "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
]>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="1280" height="1024" viewBox="0 0 1280 1024" overflow="visible" enable-backgroun
d="new 0 0 132.72 127.219" xml:space="preserve">
<image xlink:href="~/Theme/Wallpapers/-your-favorite-wall-paper-" x="0" y="0" width="1280" height="1024"/>
<text x="100" y="200" fill="white" font-family="Nimbus Mono L" font-size="14" kerning="2">%text</text>
</svg>

2. Next we create a script to fetch the most recent Twitter message and then embedding it in the image. The script is called change-wallpaper and is placed in the bin directory. It has the following:
   text=`python -c "import urllib;print eval(urllib.urlopen('http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=ubuntu&lang=en').read().replace('false', 'False').replace('true', 'True
').replace('null', 'None'))['results'][0]['text'].replace('\!','').replace('/','\/')"`
cat ~/Theme/Wallpapers/wall-tmpl.svg | sed "s/%text/$text/g" > ~/Theme/Wallpapers/wall.svg

3. We then add the following entry to crontab to fetch Twitter messages every minute:
   # m h dom mon dow command
* * * * * ~/bin/change-wallpaper

4. Run the script once, it will create a file called wall.svg in your Wallpapers directory. Set this as your desktop background and watch the background change every minute!

You could get very creative with this. You could have your calendar reminders embedded directly into your desktop background or you could have dynamically fetched background images with your own random fortune quote. The possibilities are enormous!

If you liked this, you may also like

• June 11, 2009 — Associating files with URLs on Ubuntu (Gnome) – a quick hack
• June 21, 2009 — My weekend hack – Twitter Trending Topics
• July 11, 2009 — Getting Reliance (Huawei) USB Data Card to work in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
• July 15, 2008 — Getting Rosegarden to work in Ubuntu (Gnome)
• July 12, 2008 — Adventure with Ubuntu, Wubi, yum, libc and the like
• May 3, 2008 — The Afterthoughts – Gmail forwarding and service interoperability – an interesting observation
• April 23, 2008 — Privacy disasters with aggregation services
• March 16, 2008 — Downloading your data using Greasemonkey
• November 13, 2007 — Microblogging experiences
• November 5, 2007 — Twittering at twitter.com

The first thing that I wanted to try was to revive my old application. The application has been inactive because it has surpassed the total stored data quota and I never managed to find time to revive it.

One of the biggest issues that I mentioned last time, was the ability to not be able to delete data from the application easily. There is an upper limit of 1GB on the total stored data. Considering that the data is schema-less (which means that you need more space to store the same data when compared to Relational Databases), this upper limit is severely restrictive when compared to the other quota limits that are imposed. There were about 800,000 entries of a single kind (equivalent of tables) that I had to delete!

So I started looking for ways to delete all the data available and came across this post. I decided to go with the approach mentioned here. The approach still seems to be to delete data in chunks and there is no simple way out. The maximum number of entries allowed in a fetch call is 500, which means I require 1600 calls to delete all the data.

Anyway, so I wrote a simple script as mentioned in the post above and executed it. I experimented with various chunk values and saw that 300 was the size that worked optimally; anything more either seemed to take a lot of time or actually timed out.

Here is the code that I executed:


from google.appengine.ext import db
from <store> import <kind>


def delete_all():
   i = 0
   while True:
      db.delete(<kind>.all().fetch(300))
   i = i + 1
   print i


saved this file as purger.py and executed it as:

$ python appengine_console.py twitter-trending-topics
App Engine interactive console for twitter-trending-topics
>>> import purger
>>> purger.delete_all()


A seemingly simple script, but after about a couple of hours of execution (after having deleted roughly 200,000 entries), I started seeing a 503 Service Unavailable exception. I thought this was to do with some network issues, but realized soon that this was not the case. I had run out of my CPU time quota!

To delete 200,000 entries the engine had taken up 6.5 CPU hours and this it managed to do in less than 2 hours! It had, according to the graphs, assigned 4 CPU cores to the task and executed my task in the 2 hours. At this rate, it will take me 4 days to just delete the data from my application. The Datastore CPU time quota is 62.11 hours but there is an upper cap of 6.5 hours on Total CPU time quota – the Datastore CPU Time quota is not considered separate. I am not sure how this works!

As seen in the screenshot above, the script executed for about 2 hours before running out of CPU. There was no other appreciable CPU usage in the last 24 hours. Considering that there was no other task taking up CPU, the 6.42 hours of Datastore CPU time seems to be included in the 6.5 hours of Total CPU time. So how am I supposed to utilize the rest of the 55 hours of Datastore CPU time?

I am not sure if I am doing something wrong but considering that there are no better ways of doing things here are my observations:

• It is easy to get data into the system
• It is not easy to query the data (there is an upper limit of 500 and considering that joins are done in code, this is severely restrictive).
• There is a total storage limit of 1GB for the free account
• It is not easy to purge entities – the simplest way to delete data is to delete them in chunks
• Deleting data is highly CPU intensive – and you can run out of CPU quota fairly quickly.

So what kind of applications can we build that is neither IO intensive nor CPU intensive? What is Google’s strategy here? Am I missing something? Is anything wrong with my analysis?

If you liked this, you may also like

• June 22, 2009 — What I dislike about Google AppEngine
• June 21, 2009 — My weekend hack – Twitter Trending Topics
• January 6, 2009 — Why it is the way it is – an analysis of the proposal by TimBL of the WWW
• July 21, 2007 — Have I stopped blogging?

When I bought the Sony Reader (PRS600BC), I didn’t put much thought into it. I compared it only to the other well-known reader at the time – the Amazon Kindle – and decided without doubt that I am going for the Sony reader. Frankly, I didn’t research for other options and I wasn’t even aware of the other readers in the market.

So if you ask me, how does this compare to, say the Nook, or other digital readers in India that use e-ink or the tons of other Chinese digital readers that can be hacked, I don’t have an answer. What I can do tell you is why I made this choice and what I feel after having used it for a couple of months.

So let’s begin with the choice:
Between the Sony readers and the Kindle, the choice for me was obvious. Even if the Kindle was dirt cheap and had better look and feel and amazing features, I would still go with the Sony reader at this point in time, for the simple reason that the Sony reader supports EPUB, and the Kindle does not (read the disclaimer below). As the DRM debates are on, I felt that the Amazon Kindle does not have EPUB support and I was not sure what documents would work without issues on the Kindle and what would not. It made no sense to me to have to pay Amazon (howerver few a cents) or let Amazon decide what is and what isn’t appropriate to upload into the Kindle (read disclaimer below). On the other hand, the Sony reader has no such reservations – connect the reader, allow the device to mount, drag and drop your documents and you will be reading your book on the reader in less than a minute.

Now, when I talk about open formats, people automatically assume that it means I can copy pirated versions of books into the reader and that’s the reason why the Sony reader is favored, but I think the reason is slightly different. Let us look at it in a little more detail.

Here is the definition of open format from openformats.org:
We will say that a file format is open if the mode of presentation of its data is transparent and/or its specification is publicly available.

Why is it so important?
Well, the fact that the reader supports open formats means that I can think of tons of uses for my reader. I can use it not only to read my books, but I can also create documents in the format that it supports and then upload them into the reader. What the document is – is totally up to me to decide.

For example, suppose I find an interesting website/blog which has some content that I intend to read on my reader, I can just fetch the website contents using wget, and then use html2epub to convert them into an EPUB document and upload it to my reader in minutes. Is it as simple in a Kindle? How is the support in Linux? I was not sure.

You may now say, “But that’s for geeks; how about the non-geeks? How do they benefit by going with the Sony reader?”. This is where tools like Calibre come into picture. Calibre provides an easy interface for users to sync their documents and news feeds with the reader. It also has the feature of syncing Google Reader content with your reader. All this is possible, because of one decision that Sony made – to support open formats.

So for me, the decision was simple – if the reader does not support open formats I would not go with it.

Enough of the comparison, so what should I expect in a reader?
A reader is an equivalent of a book. It is designed to as closely match a real book as possible. So expect any feature that you would have in a regular book and you wouldn’t be disappointed. Note taking, ability to bookmark pages etc are natural to expect in a reader. If your expectations however are closer to that of a cell phone and you say, “Does this play movies? Does it record video?”, my only answer is, “Cummon guys, it’s a reader!” Of course, there are certain things that you could expect in a e-reader, for eg: bluetooth that allows a simple sync of documents. The reader has the ability to play music (or I would say play audio-books), and also display photos, but I am not a big fan of it – I always believe in buying a device which does one thing well – the reader is meant to do everything with e-books, and do it well.

So now to the actual features and what I liked and what I disliked:

The pros:

• Boots in less than a second and takes you back to where you left – the Sony reader remembers where you stopped reading a book and takes you to the same page the next time you open the book.
• The touch screen is cool and extremely useful – the coolest use of this is I can double-tap on any word and its meaning appears in the bottom of the screen. I am so used to this feature now that I sometimes find myself tapping a word in an actual book and expecting its meaning to appear in the bottom! (I am not kidding). Another use of this is to take notes – just bring up the note taking feature and just select the words using the stylus. You can even use the draw mode to circle words and then write your note next to it! Double-tap the right corner of the screen and it bookmarks the page.
• The battery backup is amazing – I am not sure how many times I have charged the reader in the last 2 months, but I can tell you its not a whole lot.
• The reader is able to render PDFs with images and size does not seem to be an issue – I have tried uploading PDFs of 150MB and more and the reader effortlessly rendered it.
• The reader auto-flows documents at various zoom sizes – once you get comfortable at a certain font size, you can ensure that every document you read is of the same font size so that you can read documents extremely fast.
• Enough space – with 512MB of memory, the reader has sufficient space to store tons of books. But if you think you are short of space, you have the option of popping in a SD card. I am yet to find the need to do that.

The cons:

• The contrast could have been better – a common complaint with Sony readers. The e-ink technology seems to increase the contrast with light so the contrast is a problem in low light.
• The glare – another common complaint with Sony readers – the touch screen creates a glare and so can hurt your eyes if not held the right way. It took me some time to get used to this but I don’t see it as a problem now.
• No backlight – this is a problem which has been solved in the next version of the reader, Sony Digital Reader – PRS700BC, but the PRS 600 BC does not have a backlight making it tough to read books in low light.
• The touch screen makes the reader look like a page behind a glass – making it look unnatural.
• The music player seems to suck up a lot of power.
• Software bugs: Considering that it has been only 2 months since I bought the reader, I have run into quite a few bugs already. Here are a few:
  1. The most disturbing one of all is the reader seems to reboot when it runs into an issue in some EPUB documents. Sometimes it just hangs and you need to hard-reset the reader and a couple of times even do a catastrophic failure recovery. I am not sure if the issue is with the reader or the document converter, but I would expect the reader to not fail horribly in any case.
  2. The dictionary does not work on some words and there is no way to look up some word in the dictionary except to tap on some other word, bring up the dictionary and then change the word. I think the Sony reader requires more usability tests.
  3. Tapping on a word in the dictionary should take me to the meaning of that word – many a times I find myself not knowing the meaning of some word in the meaning provided. And the only way for me to look this up is to remove the current word and look up the new word manually.
  4. The note format is confusing – the notes are stored as XML documents, but the format that is used to identify the words is confusing. I was not able to decode it.
  5. Usability issues with images in documents: The reader is excellent for reading novels but falls a little short of expectations when it comes to reading research papers with images and equations in them. The reader does render the document pretty well, but I have seen cases where images are not rendered or it is difficult to read. There is a zoom feature which allows you to zoom into documents and then drag the document around but this is quite unusable because of the delay in rendering.

All in all, I would say, Sony has made an excellent effort at building an e-reader. It would take another couple of releases before we can expect it to mature, but I would say I am pretty content with what it already has and I don’t mind waiting a couple of years before upgrading.

Disclaimer: A few of these words may already be outdated considering that Kindle may support drag and drop of documents and have some form of ePub support (or a official converter) soon. Further, the DRM debates are still on, discussing trade-offs between piracy and usability.

A few of my top posts

• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights
• June 22, 2009 — What I dislike about Google AppEngine
• June 6, 2009 — Contact
• May 27, 2009 — Trip to the Smoky mountains
• June 13, 2009 — Color level editing with GIMP
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• April 19, 2008 — iRead – a social book discovery revolution
• June 11, 2009 — Associating files with URLs on Ubuntu (Gnome) – a quick hack
• February 24, 2010 — Trek to Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda – Day 1 experiences

I reached the place around 5pm and had expected it to be the right time. It was quite sunny and hot until 6pm and I was not able to get good snaps as I was directly facing the sun. It was a clear bluish sky and I couldn’t see any interesting patterns in the sky. I was disappointed. There were hoards of pigeons near the entrance and it was quite a sight to see them fly but I didn’t manage to get a sharp snap of a pigeon in flight.

I waited until the sun descended behind the buildings and then managed to get a few snaps of the sunset with the reflection in the water.

One of the other reasons to go to Sankey Tank in the evening was to check out the musical fountain which was a recent addition to Sankey Tank. I was all prepared and I had taken my tripod with me. The show started around 7pm.

Although it wasn’t as good as I had expected it to be, I managed to get a few long exposures of the fountain and returned back content.

If you liked this, you may also like

• May 23, 2009 — Trips to Ranganathittu, Varthur lake and Sankey Tank
• September 9, 2007 — Sankey tank – sunset
• July 19, 2010 — Trip to Dubare, Pollibetta, Talakaveri, Bhagamandala
• July 6, 2010 — Trip to Mandalpatti, Madikeri, Dubare and Bylakuppe
• February 28, 2010 — An evening in Lalbagh
• February 9, 2010 — Trip to Turahalli, Chudahalli, Agara and Begur
• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• June 14, 2009 — Early morning in Lalbagh
• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights

I had never visited the Lalbagh lake side after I bought my SLR so, since we didn’t have any major plans for this weekend, I thought I will see what I can get spending an evening beside the lake in Lalbagh. I wasn’t disappointed.

I started off with my wide angle clicking snaps of the trees. The sizes of some of these trees amazed me – huge would be an understatement. They seemed easily a 100 years old if not more. I felt bad considering that the government could be reckless in allowing the Metro Rail Corporation to acquire parts of Lalbagh and cut down trees in the name of development.

Anyway, politics apart, I continued along the walking path. Most benches were taken by couples and there were a few people walking/running along the path. There were a few feeding whatever they could to the ducks in the lake and a few others returning with boxes of grapes from the ‘Drakshi Mela (Grape fest)’. A few workers were on to their routines of cleaning up the place and watering the plants.

And then there were squirrels, which were half-alarmed by the humans, but half-curious to see what they can get. The dogs seemed to enjoy it too – and were playing beside the walking path.

I also got to see quite a few water birds. It seems strange that these birds are generally not visible to the casual visitor but if you have a camera in your hand you tend to spot quite a few of them. There were egrets, pond herons, ducks, mynas, kites and other birds that I don’t know the names of. There was a huge pelican too and it was quite a sight to see it fly.

I clicked a few snaps and waited until sunset and returned back home content with my visit.

If you liked this, you may also like

• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• June 14, 2009 — Early morning in Lalbagh
• January 21, 2007 — Lalbagh flower show
• July 19, 2010 — Trip to Dubare, Pollibetta, Talakaveri, Bhagamandala
• July 6, 2010 — Trip to Mandalpatti, Madikeri, Dubare and Bylakuppe
• March 3, 2010 — Sunset at Sankey Tank
• February 9, 2010 — Trip to Turahalli, Chudahalli, Agara and Begur
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights
• June 2, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Be there!

So with the experience from day 1, our spirits were low. Our guide who had been in this place for more than 20 years, didn’t know the exact route. People rarely visit Ombattu Gudda and of the people who do, most go via Gundya, and hardly anyone ever does both Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda together.

So we decided to take a slightly shorter path than the one which was decided earlier.

We started off early in the morning. We went towards Bhairaveshwara temple and met some local people and asked them for the route. The routes here are usually forest landmarks and needless to say there are no other signs. We started moving towards one of the hills as per the instructions of a person we met on the way. We were out of water and we had decided to fill up on the way. This, in hindsight was a bad decision – and in future I will always remember to always keep my bottles full whenever I come across a water source. It is a tradeoff – more the water, heavier the rucksack, but I guess it is better to be with water than without.

We asked the guide if he is aware of any water source on the way – we were noticing small streams of water as we walked – so he said there should be a bigger stream somewhere on top, so we decided to continue. When we started climbing the hill, we decided to take some water from a small stream there, just in case we don’t find a larger source further up. The water was very slow moving. We had chlorine tablets – so we decided to use them and fill up our bottles. This in hindsight was a really good decision as we would be without water for the next 10km until we reached Lakshmi Estate.

We also had some quick breakfast to recharge our batteries since we had a steep climb ahead. The climb was the steepest in the entire trip – but it was quite short. As we finished this, we could see the legendary jeep track that most people know of (who have done this trek). The scene from here was really good – there were hills on all sides and of varying sizes. The jeep track that we see in the shot below is what we had to take and the place where it disappears is somewhere were Ombattu Gudda summit would be.

As you can see, there are hardly any trees on the way and it was extremely hot and humid and we had limited supply of water. We started following the jeep track.

You think that on day 2, since we have a lesser stock of food, it will be less treacherous – but you are wrong. You have all the tiredness from day 1 and so that compensates the decrease in weight.

As we moved towards what we thought was the summit, the guide was still clueless as to how much of the distance was remaining. The water stock was very low – we hardly had a liter of water per person. Suddenly I noticed that my phone had signal – so we decided to call a person who could help us out. We described our current position and I am not sure if he misunderstood our position, but he said that we were in the wrong path. He asked us to retreat back 1km and take an alternate path. We decided to do that and realized that the alternate path was a dead-end. At this point, we lost hope – it would be extremely dangerous to continue with no hope of finding water and not knowing how much of the distance remains. The guide also seemed exhausted. So we took the decision to retreat.

We had to go about 7km back to Lakshmi estate – I found this very tough because of the heat and the humidity. I also twisted my ankle a couple of times because of the heavy rucksack and the uneven roads. We were exhausted by the time we reached Lakshmi estate. We drank as much water as we could and rested for a while. We realized that we were just a km away from the summit.

The people at Lakshmi estate agreed to cook food for us. Meanwhile, we wanted to have a bath and what is a better place than a small waterfall nearby! It was a heavenly experience after all the things we had been through. Post that, we had a wonderful meal and rested a bit more.

We then had to go another few kilometers to the gate where our driver was to pick us up. When we sighted the Tempo Traveler we were shouting – it was a sigh of relief that all went well and we were heading home!

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• February 24, 2010 — Trek to Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda – Day 1 experiences

So when Manja asked me if I wanted to come for a trek to Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda, I was in 2 minds. On one hand, this is an opportunity not to miss. It had been a long time since I had gone on a trek and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. On the other hand, both Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda are moderately tough treks and require the help of guides. In fact, Ombattu Gudda is known for people getting in and never coming back, and then being found unconscious. There have been incidents of snake bites, and people getting lost forever. In fact, most of the people who had come with us on the trip had gone to Ombattu Gudda just a couple of weeks back and had lost their way in the woods. Thankfully they found their way out to tell us the story. They said even the GPS was useless because of the dense vegetation. This time, not only were they planning to go again, but take an altogether different route which was seldom taken. Further, it was 2 treks in 2 days. To add to it, I was kind of busy with my office work and the fact that it had been a year since I did a trek made me a bit uncomfortable. It is in these situations where the decision that you take in the moment makes a difference. I decided to go.

Manja did the complete organization and I didn’t have to do a whole lot. We communicated over mail and the trip plan and the list of things to carry was all known a week prior. Here is the list: 1 or more pairs of dress, torch and spare batteries, cap/hats, camera, match box/lighter, sleeping bag, knife, tissues, kerosene, sunscreen lotion, 2 liters of water bottle, food items (chapathi, jam, noodles, chocolates, biscuits, dates, glucose, electral, fruits, salt), a good backpack, few spare newspapers/plastic bags, tents, first-aid, paper plates. The plan was to go to Shishila and from there, conquer Ettina Bhuja on the first day, camp there the first night, and then head to Ombattu Gudda the next day and go to Lakshmi estate where we asked the driver to pick us up. The total distance we were planning to trek was about 16-18km.

The preparation for the trek started a week prior to the trek. I had to get a slightly bigger backpack (rucksack) as my backpack would not suffice to carry the sleeping bag, and 2 days worth of food and clothes. I also needed some good shoes as I was uncomfortable with my present one. So I bought a Rucksack (Wildcraft Trailblazer 50 lt), Woodland shoes and a sleeping bag (Wildcraft) over the week. I started wearing the shoes to make sure I am comfortable in them and I started walking to office as swiftly as I can. More than the physical exercise I needed the mental preparation.

We left to Shishila on the night of Feb 11th. I had only an hour or so to put everything into my bag and was extremely nervous of missing something due to the last minute packing. We reached Shishila early morning on 12th at around 6:30. We had made breakfast arrangements at a person’s (by name Gokhale) house. We had breakfast and got our food for the afternoon packed from there and headed to Ettina Bhuja.

It wasn’t long before the excitement began. In the first 15 minutes of our trek, we had to cross 3 streams. Typically when you trek to places, the first few minutes you are extremely careful about not getting your shoes/clothes wet and are wary about our moves. But once you accidentally drop into the water, you stop caring and that is when the actual excitement begins. It was the 2nd stream when it happened to me.

It was uncommon to come across streams, dried up river-beds, dense vegetation, numerous previously unseen strange plants/trees, plain grass-lands etc. The elevation was not a lot to begin with but it steadily increased as we neared the summit. If you ask me, this is not quite the right time to go to Charmadi Ghats since the summer heat makes you perspire and lose water – which can lead to dehydration or muscle cramps. It was extremely humid and the 8kg baggage on the back only adds to the woes. I had my camera hanging from my neck during the initial part of the trek, but this only made things worse as I had to hold it with one hand to prevent it from swaying and this made it difficult to climb. So during the tougher parts of the trek, I had to keep it in my rucksack so that I could balance my body better.

Having an SLR is wonderful if someone could drop it at the summit along with the lenses and the tripod, but if you need to carry it with you for every inch of the trek it is an entirely different situation. I was in 2 minds when I started the trip as to whether to carry my 70-300mm lens, whether to carry the camera bag or to just stuff the body and the 18-55 lens in the rucksack. I decided to go with the telephoto.

You ask the guide how much time it takes and whatever he says, you don’t think of it as a lot, but then you realize that the time he says and the time you take could be easily a factor of 3-4 apart. So after a while you get used to multiplying the time he says with 3 and estimating the time remaining. It is very similar to situations where people keep their watches 10mins faster than the actual time and automatically read it by deducting 10mins when they need to know the time. My previous trek experiences had taught me one thing. Expect more. Prepare for the worst. Unless you are at the summit, you are not there (I know this might seem obvious, but if you have been trekked somewhere you will know what I mean).

You go through dense vegetation which provides you some relief from the sun. But there are grass-lands where the sun hits you directly. In these situations you rely on your hat to protect yourself from the sun and this makes you feel hotter and you feel like removing your hat and feel the sun is better, atleast it doesn’t make you feel you are inside a sack.

It is easy to get philosophical after a while and you start thinking about the experience and put it in the context of your comfy homes and polluted cities and debate in your mind, why one is better than the other.

I am not sure how many hills we had to cross to finally reach the summit but I can tell you it was a lot. Although I had a heavy breakfast I was extremely hungry after about 4 hours of trekking. We stopped to lunch on the way and lied down to take a small nap. I actually rested on some pointed rocks and had announced that I am not getting up until we are moving again. The food that we packed consisted of 5 chapathis each and this seemed like god-sent. It was as if we deserved it for some feat that we had achieved. We constantly compared this to the expensive and unworthy food that we have in Bangalore. After lunch, I used my sleeping bag like a pillow and rested for some time. It was a blissful moment.

Post the lunch break we started off again. It seemed like everyone had revitalized themselves and the first 15 mins after lunch everyone seemed to climb very quickly. But then it was the same story all over again. Typically you expect your bag to become lighter as the day progresses, since you drink water and have food, but then when you put the bag on your back you don’t feel any difference. We entered a grass land and it got extremely hot. We actually took more breaks than before lunch.

At one point close to the summit I just dumped my bag beside a rock and collapsed next to it. I was extremely exhausted and wanted a break. I think I rested for about 15 mins and then when I pulled my bag up I saw a snake right below the place where I had dumped the bag. It was brownish in color and about a feet in length.

Beyond this it was just another 10 mins and we reached the place where we were supposed to camp. There is a small stream about 5 mins from the camping area; we filled our bottles, washed up and started pitching our tents. We didn’t have a lot of time as it was already 4:30 and we had to get firewood for the campfire and pitch our tents and then head to the peak – which was another 30-45 mins of climb – we had to be there before sunset.

The final climb to the summit is extremely dangerous but entirely worth it.

You can see the wonderful hill ranges, and the sun setting behind them. One of the important peaks visible from the summit is Amedikkallu. We clicked quite a few snaps and I got to use my telephoto.

We didn’t want to stay there until sunset as it would be extremely tough to climb down in the dark – considering that it was a new moon day. So we got down to a slightly lower elevation and continued to experience the sunset.

We got back to our tents and started preparing noodles. One of the hottest topics that we discussed was the plan for the next day. We realized at this point that the guide (who supposedly has been doing this for 20 years) had not once taken the route that we planned to take. He showed us a huge peak next to ours and said “Cross that, and then another one, and then another one and then you have the peak of Ombattu Gudda” – that’s 4 in all! After the first day’s experience most of us were not prepared to go through with this and we started enquiring about alternate routes.

As a parting remark, let me add something from Bill Bryson’s ‘Walk in the woods’: If there is one thing that the AT (Appalachian Trail) teaches, it is low-level ecstacy — something we could all do with more of in our lives.

To read more about this particular trek:
Manjunath’s post on Ettina Bhuja trek
Sundaram’s post on Ettina Bhuja trek

The post continues here.

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• February 25, 2010 — Trek to Ettina Bhuja and Ombattu Gudda – Day 2 experiences

The recent trips are all from the list and this trip was one of them.

We had studied the routes and estimated the time and once again, we finished the trip according to the plan. We used Google Maps and Wikimapia to find the exact locations of these places and a few online blogs to learn what is worth visiting.

The idea was to cover these places in one circle – start from Indiranagar, go to Kanakapura road, visit the places around Kanakapura road, and then use the Kaglipura junction to reach Bannerghatta road and then onto Begur and back. The round trip would be close to 90km. We started from Indiranagar at around 6am and reached Turahalli around 7am just in time for sunrise. The hill over here is a very short climb and you can see quite a few people visiting this place for their morning walk, exercise etc.

The place is filled with varieties of birds. The hills are famous for rock-climbing and you will see that quite a few of these have been named and the difficulties of climbing them have been identified.

On the top, you see a small Shani temple. The temple was closed when we visited.

After satisfying ourselves with a 100 snaps, we headed to Agara village. You need to take a diversion from Kanakapura road towards Agara village; very close to the NICE road. The diversion is close to Tataguni bus stop. This place has a small tank (Agara kere or Agara lake). The route to Agara is pretty good and is a good place to escape the city life.

From here, we headed to Chudahalli reservoir. Agara and Chudahalli are very close to each other. This place has quite a few water birds and butterflies so is an ideal spot to use your telephotos. Supposedly, this place is even better in the rainy season.

We then took an internal road to reach Kaggalipura and then headed to Bannerghatta. This stretch has bad roads and for quite some distance you won’t see a soul. There are a few lakes on the way (including TK Falls or Thottikallu falls). We had earlier planned to visit this place too, but the locals told us that the place had almost dried up and it is not worth visiting. Considering that it was noon and the sun was sharp, and we had to walk a km to reach the place, we decided not to visit.

We then headed to Begur. Begur is famous for the Pancha Lingeshwara Temple which is said to be about 1300 years old. Begur was supposedly prominent during the Chola era. It is easy to reach this place via Hosur road and is the suggested route if you are visiting from the city. However, since we were coming from Bannerghatta, we took the route via Hulimavu.

The place is undergoing renovation. They plan to clean up the walls and the inscriptions and build the dwaras (doors).

We took the Hosur road to enter the city and were back by evening.

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• July 19, 2010 — Trip to Dubare, Pollibetta, Talakaveri, Bhagamandala
• July 6, 2010 — Trip to Mandalpatti, Madikeri, Dubare and Bylakuppe
• March 3, 2010 — Sunset at Sankey Tank
• February 28, 2010 — An evening in Lalbagh
• August 10, 2009 — Lalbagh Flower Show – August 2009
• June 30, 2009 — Trip to Gopalaswamy betta and BR hills
• June 14, 2009 — Early morning in Lalbagh
• June 6, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Event highlights
• June 2, 2009 — Startup City 2009 – Be there!
• May 23, 2009 — Trips to Ranganathittu, Varthur lake and Sankey Tank