Tittle-Tattle

This is my first visit to the US and past 6 weeks have been a nice experience. I have these many things to write about, not sure if my schedule here will allow me to write on them - The Journey to the US Driving in US Snowfall Sight Seeing One good thing about the place where I am staying here is that I wake up every morning with this view outside the window - It doesn't snow every morning here. And sleep with this view outside my window - The Gateway Arch has been my prime subject in photographs so far. And I guess I would be uploading various photos of it if I manage to post all my blogs I mentioned above. When I was starting from India, my friend told me about this and it still struck me when I landed here in the downtown of St Louis. You feel like there is some curfew imposed in the city. There are very less people on the street. All you see is cars (if at all). It can also be due to the cold weather. In this city, I guess ...

We recently went for a Trip to Coorg on the Jan 26 weekend. It was an interesting trip because it happened in a very unplanned manner. We have been thinking for sometime to go out, go on a long drive, go somewhere sorts. So we thought, we will go for a day long trip on Jan 26 weekend, starting on Saturday morning and coming back on the same day. And we finalized on Hogenekkal for this day long trip. Saturday morning came and we started for Hogenekkal, we heard that there was no good place to eat around Hogenekkal so we packed lots of food as well. When we reached the Silk Board Flyover (Bangalore), a discussion started and this idea to drive to Coorg instead was thrown in and everyone agreed. We had no stuff to change to for the overnight halt, no hotel bookings and no places decided, I had just browsed thru a traveler's guide the last night, noted a few places (in mind) in Coorg and then I forgot picking that book up in the morning haste. By the time we decided to go to Coorg inst...

A few friends and ex-colleagues of mine have come up with an interesting idea about travel search. First a little background - The Indian Railways operates around 8700 passenger train trips but still these many trips are not sufficient to give you point to point connectivity to around 6,856 railway stations. So we have this practice of connecting trains. To go from point A to B, you first go from A to C then from C to B. You can have various options depending on your fare, time and location preferences. And you may want to check about the availability on these routes, the pricing, time taken etc. To this, if you want to add the options provided by the fast growing air travel industry of India, you will have even more options to compare for. So what my friends have done is that they have come up with a website called http://www.90di.com , which lists all the connection options from point A to point B in India. One can select modes like Train, Flight and Train+Flight and it fetches inf...

When I checked for the source of traffic to my blog today it showed one link from Yahoo! OurCity . On exploring it further I was pleasantly surprised to see that Yahoo! OurCity for Mysore contains my Mysore Trip blog . Yahoo! posts the results of this Technorati Search in the Travel Blog section. That was cool anyway! ~mks

Last Saturday we went on a trip to Mysore. We drove all the way from Bangalore and came back on the same day. We used SH-17 (Bangalore-Mysore State Highway) for our travel. Our first stop being Sangam at Srirangapatna . A Sangam is a sanskrit word meaning confluence. At Allahabad its the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. This sangam at Srirangapatna is different. Actually the town of Srirangapatna is an island and is enclosed by the river Kaveri . So the point where the river Kaveri meets back again is called Sangam. The river Kaveri is sacred for the people in this part of India. And the people you see in the photograph above were actually going to perform some puja on those small islands in the river. Our next stop was the Dariya Daulat bagh. It used to be summer palace of Tipu Sultan built in year 1784. As the description says, its made up of wood and work done on those wood is huge and amazing. Imagine something like that, wholly made up wood and still stand...

I came back from long vacation recently. Itinerary being - Bangalore --> Delhi --> Varanasi --> Lucknow --> Unchahar --> Lucknow --> Delhi --> Bangalore. Except for one train journey (Lucknow - Delhi), all the travels by train and plane were on time, "RT" as they write on the Rail inquiry boards. And I really feel good about this overall RT experience. The train delay was interesting. We were coming from Lucknow to Delhi by this Kaifiyat Express (Super fast). It runs from Azamgarh ( Kaifi Azami 's birth place and now famous for Abu Salem) to Delhi. It was an hour late at Lucknow and we boarded the train at 12:00am in the morning. When I woke up later in the morning, we were heading towards Aligarh and we were around 2 and a half hour late already. Aligarh is around 2 hrs from Delhi at full speed. At Aligarh, the train stopped, and after sometime we started wondering why, and then were sure that this train is now going to pass Rajdhanis heading towa...