A sign at the Entrance to the Valley of Flowers (VoF) says it all The passionate forest guard at the gate told me that he had been scolded by a senior officer that the VoF had no flowers, and that he, the forest guard, should put up a sign warning everyone so. The experience I had was entirely different, I saw a myriad flowers blooming and a tranquil Valley. And I thought to myself that: they are really blind those who will not see. These flowers were very different to to those I had seen on my earlier trip in August 2015, view my photographs of the earlier trip at the link here and my blog of that trip over here Flowing water everywhere A kilometer after buying a ticket at the forest check post, I cross the steel bridge across the Pushpawati River and begin the ascent into the VoF. The ticket is valid for three days of which I will visit on two. The mountainsides are striated with waterfalls fed by t he melting snow, whi...
�We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.� ? Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wind's Twelve Quarters Alas, it is difficult to get lost in a forest in India, there are few unexplored forests left and it is difficult to be alone. However the Satpura Tiger Reserve is one such forest where the crowds are less and the resorts are sensibly made to merge into ambient nature. Our welcome by a leopard by the side of the road as we drove in at night was a wonderful precursor of the two days ahead. The haughty animal, disdainfully looked at us and slowly walked away into the jungle. Here is where we let go of our daily electronic cocoons and freed ourselves to the joys of simply being at one with nature. The bridge and a hut at Reni Pani Resort... ...is a perfect example of being one with nature. Local material is used on the outside to give a natural ambience to the...
It still seems strange but at the time I dived the huge wreck in Vakarai, it never occurred to me to question what the wreck was, what ship had gone down when to create this paradise? I guess at the time, I was still a relative neophyte, more concerned with fish and photographs. This wreck was the first that really woke my interest in wrecks as more than just fish aggregators and pretty sites. On our return to Colombo, DJ enrolled me inadvertently in his search for the name and origin of the mysterious wreck. As we scoured lists of sunken ships and coordinates it became apparent that there were two strong candidates for the wreck, both sunk during the Japanese attack in April, 1942 which also sank the world famous Hermes . The first candidate was one of the ships from the Hermes convoy, the merchant navy ship the British Sergeant which was an oil tanker that had put out to sea that fateful day before being sent to the bottom by the Japanese raiders. I found a rather thrilling story ab...
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