Unworded - Is it a bird or a flower?

'Bird of Paradise' flower

A Midsummer Morning's Dream

The pictures speak for themselves for contrast. Last Wednesday (25-May-11), woke up in the morning to see a blanket fog that had engulfed the whole place.

Couldn't believe it was mid-summer and I am seeing fog with a mild drizzle with a wind-chill making you feel as if you are at some hill station in winter.   :-)

Bangalore does have its Wow! surprises ...

Granted that I live at the fringes of Bengaluru to savour these for whatever time it lasts.

With due apologies to William Shakespeare for punning his title

Unworded - Gubbachchi

Bangalore's Paradise lost - As happy as a lark - Rare visitor at home - Wake up to chirps

Unworded - Flower Beautiful

Hanging Flowers - Clicked at Munnar

Unworded - Color contrasts

Tamizh New Year Greetings & Wishes!

 

Lavender amongst shades of green - Jacaranda blooms

Unworded - As fresh as dew

ரோஜாக்களில் பன்னீர்த்துளி; வழிகின்றதேன் அது என்ன தேன்
One is obvious, Guess the other (the stalk is a giveaway)?
Imaged with a Nokia N73 in macro mode and composited using Gimp

Unworded - Plane view - Crop Circles

Surprised how the farmers find time to do the patterns as these

Shot using Nokia N73, Downsized/adjusted with Picasa 3

This picture was taken approximately half an hour later on the same flight path of where this picture was taken. This region is the bread basket of the US.

Unworded - Plane view - Peaks and valleys

Shot using Nokia N73, Downsized/adjusted with Picasa 3, Effects with PhotoFiltre

Travelogue - The Switchback Mountain

Now that my vacation plans are toast, I thought I'll pull a travelogue that has been sitting as a draft for a significantly long time (almost 6 months), and publish.

Blessed are the people with a home in the mountains or close to it. It is an experience to be on the hills or close to one. The air, the silence, the sounds, the vistas, the clouds, the mist!!! I could go on and on.

The hills in the distance beckon

How many times while going on journeys, you come across a fork in the road or a board with directions to a place of which you have little or no idea of, but somehow urges you to visit it? Our visit to Kolli Hills (Kolli Malai in Tamizh) in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu was one such. Used to see markers to it on the Salem-Namakkal highway near Rasipuram on my drives to Thanjavur, and before one such trip, decided to take the fork to Kolli Hills and then continue the journey. This was a rare 'whole family' occasion with my parents and siblings/family joining the trip.

Lonely road to the hills

Trolled about the place on the Web and one of the high points of the place was the approach to the top. I am not sure, but the road from the foothills to the top of the mountain must figure at least in the Limca book of records.

National Highway 7, as smooth as it gets

Bengaluru (mind it, from the outskirts) to Salem, starting in the morning, was an effortless cruise due to the NHAI paving an international grade road for the entire stretch. Detoured into Salem, packed lunch at Adyar Ananda Bhavan (A2B) at Salem and started towards Namakkal. The drive till the Rasipuram diversion was good (the national highway NH7 is being 4 laned all the way to Kanyakumari as a part of the North-South corridor) and then an abrupt slow-down to a crawl as we entered Rasipuram. After enquiries and around half an hour of further driving, we were at the foothills of the mountain range.

Kolli Hills is a part of the Eastern Ghats and is around 1300 metres above mean sea level (MSL). The climb up is heady. 70 hair-pin bends (or switchback turns) till you reach the first village on the top (approx. 20 kms) and from there to other places (villages) around on the hills, there are further more hair-pin bends to negotiate. Either you can enjoy those 180° turns or sit tight with your head reeling and stomach churning (and inhaling a citrus fruit or eat sour candy).

You can see the road starting at the top left corner and snaking its way to the center

Negotiating a curvy hair-pin bend

Green carpet

The beauty with any mountain/hill road is that as you slowly go up the gradient, the forest cover increases and by the time you realize it, there is a valley on one side and you have climbed the hills and a carpet of green soothes you. The hair-pin bends here were not difficult to negotiate with the sparse traffic, having negotiated the steep ghats from Bandipur to Ooty via Masinagudi (36 high gradient hair-pin bends, boy! what a route it is) a few weeks prior to that. It took around an hour to get to the top of the hills from the base, and the journey was worth it.

Approaching the summit

Stopped near a wayside temple with a mountain stream beside it, with a nice flow of water. The water was cold to the touch and refreshing. After standing relaxed in the flowing water for a few minutes in rapt silence with nothing but the sounds of the gurgling water on the rocks and the mini waterfall, unpacked the A2B lunch and gobbled it up, sharing it with two doggies that were roaming around. Surprisingly no monkeys at that point. Especially when you are really hungry, food tastes like 'devaamritha' and A2B's curd rice slips through your tongue to the stomach.

The vista view

There was a vista point at the summit from a government guest house where the valley down below and the plains beyond can be seen. The wind was very strong at this point pushing everything around. There were a few other vista points as well, but we decided to go to a few places and then head down before darkness falls.

Arappaleeswarar Temple

Some places of interest around

This place is famous for its Paari link to Tamil Sangam literature. The anecdote is that king Paari, who on seeing a jasmine (mullai) climber on the roadside without support to climb upon, left his chariot for the creeper to use as a prop. (Mullaikku thaer koduththaan Paari) Nothing much exists of a palace or its associated trappings. There is an ancient Shiva temple (Arappaleeswarar) and a gorgeous waterfall (Aakaasa Gangai) for which you have to go down a 1000 steps. We didn't do it as the skies were darkening, tiredness was setting in, and we had to go another 160+ kms from base of the hills to reach Thanjavur and driving in the dark is treacherous because of the curvy roads till Tiruchi and demonic drivers with their headlights blazing on hi-beam. On the way down, picked up some hill produce (pineapples, oranges etc) and the oranges proved useful to overcome nausea while negotiating those 70 bends down.

The roads were lovely, especially for a road less travelled. The hills are still unspoilt and hopefully remains that way. There is an annual festival on Paari that happens which seems to get crowds there. But it is relatively peaceful and hidden, otherwise. For those who have heard of this place somewhere on TV, yes!, it was featured in a diversionary story in the Tamizh soap of a life-time, the one and only "Kolangal" (gee, I forgot the serial's name suddenly and had to look it up and whoa, I miss that stupid serial in hindsight :-))

Unworded - Contrasts

A distant moonset from a morning walk, a raging sunset from Richmond Road, Bengaluru
Montage-Picasa 3.0, Image downsize-Irfanview, Original images-Nokia N73

Unworded - A sundown over the Pacific

Sunset over the Pacific at the San Gregorio State Beach, California

Unworded - Sunrise today

And quiet breaks the dawn

Unworded - Fiery and yet mellow, Stirring and yet calm

Sunset over the backwaters of the Pichavaram mangroves (near Chidambaram)

What a fragrance!

I recently got drunk (hic!) for a few moments by the heady fragrance of the Sampigé flower (Sampangi Poo in Tamil, Champaka in Hindi) that just filled the road in a market that I pass by. Maybe there was a basketful of those flowers that just landed in from any of the villages around. No other flower comes close to having your head whirr with such a strong fragrance and the aroma wafts for a fair distance.

Jasmine (malligé, malligai, Chameli) is also aromatic, but is relatively muted, but can knock you out from close quarters. :) It is a therapy, walking through the flower market in any city and you can always see bees buzzing around the aromatic flowers. You should see the way the jasmine flowers (buds) are twined together in Madurai, a city famous for its jasmine as much as its temples. Beautiful!!! And the flower vendors count it by the number of buds twined and not by hand-lengths as is usual with flowers. So many variants, for this beauty in white, Madurai Malli, Mysoora Malligé and so on.

Another flower that can give the Sampigé, a close run for its scent, is the Thalé Hoo (aka Kédigé, Thaazham Poo, Ketaki/Kewra). Unfortunately, I have not seen it (or smelt it) for a long, long time. Very, very distinct fragrance which cannot be missed and those large pods. This is the famous flower which is condemned to non-worship in temples in Hindu mythology (Shiva Puránam), along with Brahma for untruthfulness.

Aromas and memories. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Images, courtesy of Wikipedia and University of Graz, Austria

Unworded - Beautifully symmetric, but it is also a scourge