landscapes

Hard to believe that this is also Siolim

I often go for a walk in the fields next to my home. Today I found these two dudes, just chilling in a tree.

Always a good day for a trek

Morning views

♥️

The gadariyas are back in our fields. Turning parali into goat poop. This time they're visiting from Karnataka.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus and other gems of Goa Velha, the dancers, and the setting sun.

Mornings like these ♥️

Do you see the rainbow?

#दोस्ती #Gokarna #sea #rocks #sand #sunrise

Out for a #morning #walk. These are some #fields near our #campsite.

#Milky #River #Water

भोर भई

Can't have enough of these beautiful homes

These peanuts or potatoes, whatever you wanna call them. Sticking out of the ground, a hybrid between a geodesic dome and a hangar. A structural engineer's dream come true.

Hurriedly taken pics of milky white water

You'd be tempted to call them Hobbit houses, except they likely predate Tolkien's imagination by hundreds of years.

This is a random pic with a lot wrong with it. But I'm posting it anyway because kid took it and I never seem to post pics of myself.

Must there be a cable running through every beautiful pic of the #mountains and #clouds ?

A lot going on in this pic. #Trees, a #cityscape, #mountains,#clouds and #fog. Even #monkeys, if you zoom in and hunt (not sure if Meta retains enough resolution for that).

It's all just #forest and this #abutment.

Or at least I can frame things that way 😁

Insta insists on cropping the sky out of this pic. Sigh.

And here, #hidden in the #foliage, lies the other end of the #bridge

The old #bridge spanned this #river. The river somehow has no name; it just meets the #Ganga at Phool Chatti

Spectacular #sunset scenes like this one are a bonus

...and away from the #chaos of the #city.

Birding brings me close to #nature...

आज सुबह की photos की खेती

Don't go into the #mountains in the #monsoons, they said. We've been driving through #clouds and the #rain for hours now. Wonderful #roads so far.

More #cloud #paintings, as night falls over the #japanesegarden in #Vasco. Is that #Grande in the distance, or #Pequeno?

#Clouds #painting the #sky last evening. View from #Baina beach, looking out towards #Pequeno and #Grande islands.

#Maravanthe is the opposite of #BabaBudanGiri. It looks better in pictures than when you're actually there.

#Karnataka #nature #indiaclicks

Baba Budan Giri. Pictures cannot capture the beauty of this place.

#nature #Karnataka #naturephotography #india

The view from #Sravanabelagola.

You can almost see the curvature of the earth 😳

#clouds #Karnataka #panorama

The kids will #camp with friends in our #tent, while I occupy this cosy #farmhouse

I've been unwell for some time and unable to work. So we stepped out tonight for a change in scenery and some fresh(er) air. Spending the night #camping at an #arecanut #farm.

Over the weekend we went #camping in #Maharashtra, by the #Terekhol river.

I wish I'd taken a nicer picture of the beautiful river and the fresh, cool water.

The view from Betul Fort is hard to describe. Something else altogether. Must go back there soon.

M2 contemplates the lake one last time before we leave. Good times were had. Memories were made.

The elder one dialed things up a couple of notches and took the dinghy out into the sea. The island was too rocky and he couldn't find a place to tether his boat, so he came back. He saw lots of big red and yellow crabs on the island.

#boat #sea #island #rowing #karwar #karnataka

There is a bird sitting on top of that tree. It's been there for a long time. I wonder if it is fishing, or just contemplating life.

#caboderama #goa #tree #sea #bird #nature

The view from Cabo de Rama fort is something else.

#caboderama #cola #canacona #fort #goa #travel #sea

What do you call this? When it's early in the morning and the moon is setting. Is it a moonset?

The #moon rises from behind the #rocks that the boys went #bouldering on

I could take a million pictures, and they wouldn't do justice to the beauty of the place. People come and seek divinity in the temples here. But the real peace is in the nature - the rocks, fields, birds and animals.

Spot the #langur chilling out in the #paddy #fields, as the #sun sets over the #Tungabhadra in the background

Far away view of our #campsite in #Hampi

A far away view of our #campsite in #Hampi

Birthday morning began with bicycle ride around the new neighbourhood

The #sky at #sunset burst into a riot of #colours today

#Goa is so fabulously #green in the #rains. The phone camera just does not do justice in these low light conditions. The #paddy #fields have different #shades of green, in waves. Its breathtaking.

Can you see the clouds on the road?

The view of the Anjunem Lake from up above

Somebody's delighted to be here

From here, we will drive into those cloudy hills, on the border of Goa and KA

Sigh

The rather Insta-famous Keri Foot Bridge

Canaaaaal. From a briiiiidge above it. So exciiiiiited.

Traaaaaaain आई

Rather futile attempt at capturing the beauty of Goa in the rains

More Sahayadri goodness

We went splashing in the Sanvordem waterfall today. Much fun, jumping into the cold water, and being chased by fishies trying to get a nibble at us. The trek was quite strenuous and one of our friends got hurt 😐

The road less traveled... has grown a mohawk

Our forest guide told us that the forest is walking into what were earlier farms. It is slowly reclaiming land at its edges. The forest department is not planting trees.

Meeting spot

Once manus leave...

#river #water

Jungle

Always a sucker for electrical engineering

#windmill #windmills #sugarcane #maharashtra #sahayadri #caravan

The caravan is back in action after many months, traversing the Sahayadris

'Morning

Went for a morning walk after many weeks. The sky was rather dramatic. And I met this interesting guy, Subodh Kerkar, who lives in Saligao and runs the Museum of Goa. He was seriously interviewing a ragpicker who was busy making a living out of cleaning up trash. He then proceeded to ask me probing questions about my work. Almost gave me the impostor syndrome - do I really do anything of value?

Do you do anything of value?

The sky was very dramatic, all day long

You'd think the Goa life is all sun and sand. But I'm at the beach after 1.5 months.

I should do this more often. If only it weren't raining incessantly.

#ruins #clouds

Some paintings that the clouds made for us

Pahadi ruins

Loving all the layers that are visible around this place.

Even as the sunlight fades away, the day is a glorious, colourful wrap

बादलों के ऊपर - above the clouds

We skipped town. Again.

Feeding time.

This picture is framed by the trees on all sides. The focus of the picture is the frame, not the birds. Dunno if you can notice.

Smoke on the water

घर। सपनों वाला।

Concrete stacks rising out of smoke
A setting sun
A bird headed home
And a pond settling down for the night

It's a long walk for the kids

We are getting closer to the lagoon

The bridge is situated over this river, the Ganga

To get to the lagoon we had to cross this bridge

The "lagoon" sits by the Ganga like this

#vanlife

We are now headed to this "lagoon"

#vanlife

"Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping." ~Hubert Reeves

"इसे देखना यह संडे सुबह लगा हुआ है" "Overtime बना रहा होगा" "जब सामने पहाड़ जितना काम हो तो कितना ही Overtime बना लो"

One last look of the view before we make a move.

The river is the most beautiful colour here

Lots of masti

Hard to capture these views in frames

As the day broke, the view was so serene

Our #campsite for the night.

#vanlife

#Ganges #गंगा freshly made from the confluence of Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers

#sangam #संगम #alakananda #bhagirathi

#artistic or #fail?

#Ganges #गंगा

The #sea

There is still some #green left. #Autumn isn't fully here yet.

#sun #sea #sand

Never gets old

The #ghats are such an unstoppable adventure

बहुत #coolboy

Another composition by S1

और फिर जैसे ही नीली छतरी वाले को ज़ोर से छींक आई, चारों तरफ़ पानी ही पानी बरस गया, हरियाली ही हरियाली छा गई, फूल ही फूल उग गए

This might be the last of S1's pics with me.

What do you think about it? Nature from the eyes of a twelve year old. Does the imagery talk to you?

पानी
बादल
ऊर्जा
जीवन

How #green is my #valley?

More #gnarly #trees to #haunt you at night

And then, across hills, fields, villages, palm trees and beaches, we could see the sea.

Savitri river

#झरना #waterfall

The magical sounds of nature.

We are leaving these behind

#art #devrai

Contemplating on the #pond

The view

Masti time

Down winding paths we find twisted trees

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Then we trooped into a #forest

Gnarly trees ❤️

It just doesn't stop coming down.

We are hardly complaining 😁

And then the #rain came down

#beforetherains

बरखा बहार आई

#Village #Kaza

Now we are #driving through the #hills of #Chail while it lightly #drizzles.

We indulged in some obligatory #adventure #activities 😁

It's over and out for us from #Kufri.

The #hills of #Kufri are full of #trash, #tree #stumps, #people and #cars. Sad.

The #drive and the #road are amazing, just like @deepankarbasu had said.

दीपक का मिट्टी का मकान।

आसपास सभी के मकान अब concrete और ईंट के हैं। मकान का क्या है। दिल बड़ा होना चाहिए।

कुछ दोस्त उम्र भर के होते हैं और कुछ दोस्त, पल भर के। मगर होते तो सारे ही प्यारे हैं ❤️

Our #guide today is very #naughty. He cannot walk straight. Has to jump around and crawl through barbed wire.

It's #raining. And the #clouds are #painting again.

It's raining and our tent doesn't have a rainfly. We shall see.

Good morning y'all. Sending good vibes from our cherry and apple orchard to you. Not sending any real 🍒 or 🍏 though 😀

#moonrise over the #campsite.

View from our #campsite for the night. Gotta scramble and #pitch #tent.

The #hills of #Narkand are on #fire.

The #drive from #Rampur to #Narkand is what #mountain dreams are made of. #Smooth #tarmac, wide #road, breathtaking scenery.

#stepfarming the #rocky #terrain

A weathered tree at the Tabo monastery.

#Tabo #monastery #tree

Bridges were crossed.

Better pics in the DSLR

Be like water
My friend

#Kaza #Spiti

The #Tabo #monastery was all about #peace and #earthy #beauty

And sometimes the hunter is hunted, unbeknownst to him

❤️

Shallow glacier

Sometimes you see a burst of green between the unrelenting rock and snow. And you know a river flows nearby. And a farmer toils hard to protect his field.

You would have seen images of villages and monasteries perched precariously at the edge of mountains. Usually people post about Tiger's Nest in Bhutan. Come to #Spiti and you will see this everywhere. Not every village looks down a mountainside. Some look into a green field, if there is a river flowing nearby to feed the field.

#Sagnam

All kinds of rock reliefs. We captured maybe ten types. The area easily has over a hundred. This place is a geologist's dry dream.

I have nothing to say about these structures. Don't ask me what these are. Ask me what they do to you. Once you've seen them, you are in profound awe of what wind, water and time can do.

I'm going to now try and take you through the grandeur that is the #SpitiValley between #Nako and #Tabo. We did the route on Tuesday, but I've been avoiding putting up pics.

Pictures and videos are too small the capture the vastness, the other worldliness of this place. The only way to know it is to bite the blue pill and come on over to see it for yourself.

M1: How does dad look?

M2: Obese

#savage #burn #thuglife

M1: So rude.

M2: There was this chart in school with height and recommended body weight and according to that chart I think dad is...

More pics from the sunrise at #Kasauli

It is exceptionally quiet in #Tabo. There is the sound of the wind, when it blows. There is the incessent tweeting of birds. Nothing else. I have a very good pair of noise cancelling headphones. Turning them on and off makes no difference at all here. It is surreal.

We had tea at #Nako. The restaurant owner was the nicest man. His restroom was covered in requests, in Hindi, to travelers, asking them to please leave the place clean. Common sense suggestions. It is sad that we send tourists up to these places without imparting them basic civic sense and lessons in hygiene.

#vanlife

It is Thursday morning now, and the kids refuse to leave. They want to spend the rest of the vacation here, eating delicious food and making friends with all the nice people. They no longer want snow, glaciers or scenery.

On NH505 between Karchham and Nako:

M1: This road is so broken. How can it be a National Highway?

Me: There is construction work going on, so it is broken in places. But where the road work is complete, the tarmac is as smooth as the best road in the world. They even go around manually sweeping the roads every day, to remove the stones that have fallen from the mountains above.

People from all over the country have gathered to build this road for you. Engineers, military people, and poor labourers. All of them are slogging here in the most inhospitable conditions, covered in dust, with the sun beating down on them and the wind howling all around. Every time our vehicle passes, they stop their work and move to the side. One one side is a steep fall, on the other side rocks can fall down on them. The poor labourers must be working for a few hundred rupees a day, their poor children playing beside them with rocks. The children are unwashed, unkempt, sunburnt, and when the cars whizz past they throw up little sharp pieces of stone that hit them. Yet they are all working relentlessly.

M1: Ouch!

We can never have enough #gratitude and #respect for what #nature and #mankind give us. I try as much as possible to make my children be #thankful for all they have, and to be aware of their privilege. Sometimes that ends up in rants like these.

Lots of #donkeys in #Nako today

The kids have not watched a single minute of T. V. or video, or used a smartphone, since we started. All kids need is constructive engagement.

Perfectly nice brand new concrete bridge lies unused while we had to go over a rattly, noisy, scary #metal #bridge.

We lost our way on the road to #Tabo. Looks like it wasn't such a bad thing 😀

It's the #journey not the destination!

#travel #instatravel #India #incredibleindia #mountains

This is a very #scenic, #idyllic spot. I'm unable to capture its #beauty with my phone. There are some winding stairs, a narrow path, a stone cabin. A stream flows through the place. The kind of location authors picture with words in stories.

We are #ontheroadagain. Let's see where we reach today.

Last night when we came back from dinner, we found our #caravan boxed in by a couple of other cars. We were anyway gonna sleep here tonight, so it didn't matter. However, being a city dweller, I was quite uneasy about being trapped in my spot.

In the morning I asked someone for help. She pointed out that most cars have the cellphone number of the owner printed on the car. And yes indeed, the cars blocking me were stickered. Before I could call the owner, he came and took his car away.

#Himachal is so safe that people put their numbers on their cars 😲. In Gurgaon you'd get stalked.

What's the first thing you see when you slide out of bed in the morning?

As you folks would have noticed by now, we went for a #village #walk.

Walking through villages is always the high point of any trip I make to the mountains, whether it is Himachal, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya or Assam.

We made friends with some boys from the village. 5am tomorrow they're gonna take us to a glacier nearby. Can't wait.

#HimachalTourism #HimachalPradesh

#Moar #trees

#TheHiddenLifeOfTrees

#GooglePhotos has been itching to get in on my #Instagram game

आज हमने कई दरख़्तों से दोस्ती की 😊

#TheHiddenLifeOfTrees

#apple #orchards

For #geography wonks. In this one pic you see #clouds, #snowcappedmountains, #glaciers, melting #snow and #moraine, a glacial #stream, and a #river

Like a #painting

More #mountains for you.

How does one post a wide/tall pic on Instagram?

Anywhoo. Witness some watermelon devourment 🍉

And the #camp is up before the sun went down.

We are super excited. And we are missing a bunch of little things. No carabiners 😲. Time to McGyger and #jugaad.

Is this a good spot to camp? We are surrounded on all sides by loud cows.

Reporting live from the road to #Chitkul. The scenery has now left us speechless.

Instagram wanted to filter this pic 😲

M1 asked why monks keep their head shaved. I told him it's because they want to live a simple, frugal life, and maintaining hair is a pain.

Later, I saw a girl in the nunnery who wasn't, how shall I say, conventionally beautiful. And it dawned on me. A monastery is a place where you focus on the inner beauty and character of a person. Looks and fashion, physical beauty, have no place here. It is a place where everyone is loved and accepted; where you are what you do for others, not who you are.

On the way down from Ponda, we dropped a nun and another girl. The girl was all about her phone, her sim cards, her hair, her lipstick, how she looked, selfies. She was beautiful. The nun girl was simply smiling all the time. And I realised they had almost the same face and looks. It was just embellishment which made one girl look prettier to me.

So, maybe the monks don't have hair so they can focus on their inner selves, not outer selves. And we spend our lives focusing on our and other people's outer selves.
Have one breakfast with monks and you think you've become a philosopher yourself 😁

No photos of the inside of the monastery and their place of worship and study, out of respect, even though photography was allowed.

Trying to give you a sense of the fantabulous beauty of our perch. We spent the night in the newly constructed parking lot of the #Ponda Buddhist monastery. Sharing panoramas clearly isn't Instagram's thing. Just made friends with one of the monastery #dogs who was all over me. 🐶😁

Our first view of #snowcappedmountains had the kids yelping with joy.

#roadtrip #HimachalTourism #HimachalPradesh #Jakhari

Ha ha ha ha ha (maniacal laughter)

Now that I've ensnared you all into following me, I unleash my diabological plan. One of you will use your Google foo and find us a lovely campsite that let's us open camp with our own van and tent. We reach Rampur Bushahar by 4:30pm. Somewhere near there will be ideal.

Pretty please. With sugar on top.

#HimachalTourism #HimachalPradesh

#trees #nofilter

Are we in #cherryblossom country?

#HimachalTourism #HimachalPradesh #cherries

We are leaving this behind and moving on

#Kasauli #HimachalTourism #HimachalPradesh #vanlife

देखो, देखो वोह आ गए

The mountains are here

#vanlife #HimachalPradesh #HimachalTourism #roadtrip #mountains

क्योंकि पिछला landscape पसंद आया आपको। इसलिए, यह लो, यह भी लो, सारे ले लो, और भागो यहाँ से 👾

सुंदर, बहुत सुन्दर खेत

खेती

पेड़ पर सूखता चारा

छत एक। प्रयोग कई।

Landscape

Patchwork

As the sun rises you realise that we humans have been eating away at these majestic, ancient mountains. To the left are the fort walls, built with stone quarried from the mountains afar.

Home

यह रंग नक़ली हैं

Camping