4 Nov 2025 An easy day with a small ascent and only 5 kms to walk. It was the most enjoyable day of the whole trek. I had enough bandwidth to notice and photograph tiny wild flowers. It wasn’t the flowering season, so only a few inconspicuous blooms were around – but there were plenty…
7 Nov 2025 A long, long day of travel for most of us – uneventful, right up to Dehradun. Then things decided to get interesting. A bright blue sky greeted me in the morning. The nearly full moon was slipping behind a hill, still perfectly visible and begging for photos. A small variation in the…
3 Nov 2025 Despite the thick duvets, I only managed a so-so night of sleep. In fact, throughout the trek days this was to be the story of my life. And Vinay’s too – we exchanged notes on poor sleep patterns. The call for morning lemon tea came at 6:40, despite being told it would…
2 Nov 2025 Somewhere early 2025, Ak showed interest in a Himalayan trek – and we started discussing the idea with Ashok. A “potentials” whatsapp group was created, out of which the final trek group was 6 of us: Ashok & Ashwini (the Ashes!), Vinay, Ram (primary school friend of Vinay, new to the rest…
We hadn’t planned this trek — Sandakphu quotes made us wince, so we winged it in Darjeeling instead. Two hours, 600 metres up through moss-draped ghost trees and cloud cover, Kanchenjunga somewhere behind it all. Hot daal-chawal at the top. Rain on the way down, as predicted.
A Side Quest near Darjeeling Our Tonglu trek guide Satya wanted to show us the Sidrapong hydro-electric project not far from Darjeeling. Its claim to fame is that it is the first one in Asia, operational since 1897. Satya made the discovery of this hidden gem, and he says he only takes some clients there…
Enkhuizen has been one of my favorite places to take guests to in the Netherlands, but never visited with B – this was the occasion to fix that. My fourth visit, but the first time I really understood its purpose: to honour the communities swallowed up when the Afsluitdijk turned the Zuiderzee into a freshwater…
An Easter long weekend at Rursee lake in Eifel NP, Germany. 3 hrs from Amsterdam. A 15-km hike that ended in getting lost, and B felled by a lung infection, coffee-smuggling priests, and a solo castle detour in a hailstorm.
Discovered this Japanese-American artist accidentally when browsing for 2020 calendars in American Book Center, Amsterdam! I’m attracted to his art not least because of the subject: his series of paintings on Yosemite, made around 1930. El Capitan, Half-dome, red woods. beautiful! Brings back my own nostalgic memories of Yosemite from the turn of the century……
1904 – 1989 | Spanish painter known for surrealism From back in 1990 P and I have had a major fascination for Dali. We used to drool at Dali’s surrealistic paintings seen at BITS – can’t remember how we came across them. Maybe KM had a Dali obsession that was contagious? In 2011, I got…
