One afternoon, my manager told me about an upcoming trip to Brazil. When I told the news at home, pat came the home-ministers reply “I knew it, you are all going there for the Carnival”. Ignoring the complaints from the ministry about not taking the entourage (family), all 3 members of our team started preparing. Collecting whatever information we could, we started for the airport. During the long and boring taxi ride, we finally checked our tickets, and finding that none of us were in the same row (in the plane, of course), were surprised. At the check-in counter, we instructed the young lady to change our seats so that we would be sitting together. Since she was too busy in chewing the gum, we tried to disturb her as little as possible. After an eternity, she nodded in the affirmative (or so we thought) and smartly asked us to keep the baggage together so that she could weight it, and attach it to a single ticket. She accepted our thanks gracefully, and we ran for the boarding gates. Upon reaching there, we finally tried to align ourselves with the new seat numbers. To our amazement, we found that we were still sitting separately, while our baggage had been made to sit together. Little did we realize that the fun had already started!

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The ancient city of Mamallapuram has been called the town of the seven pagodas ever since the first European explorers reached the city several centuries ago. According to popular belief, once upon a time six other temples stood along with the now famous shore temple on the shores of Mahabalipuram’s rock strewn beaches. Myth has it that the God Indra became jealous of this earthly city, and sank it during a great storm, leaving only the Shore Temple above water (Figure 1). Local fishermen have for long claimed to have had glimpses of at least some of the other temples glittering beneath the waves.

Figure 1 : The Shore Temple Complex

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A dream fulfilled. This happened to be a return journey having completed the Ashtvinayak trip while driving from Bangalore to Mumbai ( it’s another story) and my family was geared up for it.

We started off from Navi Mumbai at 12 noon and took the 6 lane Mumbai-Pune runway…er….expressway. Well, in stretches it looks like a runway. The Innova was simply flying and you do get to see some scenic spots on the way. To experience this expressway, you need to pay a toll of Rs. 118 /- for 120 odd kms. But then, we reached Pune in 80 minutes or so. We took a detour into Pune as we wanted to visit a couple of folks. Visit over, time to hit the road again. For the next 30 odd kms we did encounter some traffic. We were held up at the first of the innumerable toll plazas’ for about 20 minutes. However, after that it was a breeze. Next came the Katraj ghat section which was not high enough to qualify as a ghat. I had a funny feeling that there was no oncoming vehicle. Later, we realized it must be one way. The oncoming traffic would be on another road which we could not see. However, driving on the bends was a pleasure.
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The previous installment of this series covered reaching the small city of Interlaken in Switzerland, and the disappointment of not being able to do the cruise on the same day since we were too late. Anyhow, we drowned our sorrows the first day in some drinks and food, and resolved to see what we could do the next day.
Day 2. I got up in the morning, and given that nobody else seemed to be up, I got down to taking a few photos from the hotel room (and was trying to be different – so took some photos from the reflection off the huge glass window). I had this huge camera (the Sony DSC R1) that is as big as an SLR and takes some great photos, so did some experimentation; and by then, people were ready to get up.

Photo showing morning in Interlaken partly through a reflection in a huge glass window
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