Tower of Arabs

...is what it means (in Arabic). Tops in the list of attractions in Dubai. Designed to resemble a billowing sail, Burj Al Arab soars to a height of 321 metres, dominating the Dubai skyline. Built on an artificial island constructed 280 meters offshore, this place is simply individual, inspired, impressive & characterizes itself as the world's first "7-star" property. It has a helipad on it too.

We spent a day at this part of Jumeirah beach that offers a very close view of the architectural splendor. We walked and walked and walked some more, without being bothered of getting tanned. I had seen such blue-green waters only in the pictures earlier.The beaches here are beautiful, pretty clean and not crowded at all. Still there is enough activity around to keep you engaged. See, I love observing people without giving them my intruding looks, so I enjoyed watching them surfing, playing in water, making castles of sand, sunbathing and we also kept taking pictures of everything that caught the eyes.

We had a great morning, followed by lunch @ KFC and we were still not done with our beach love for the day so again went on exploring the beach walking in the opposite direction now. We were so deeply immersed in our conversations that we dint feel fatigued and before we realized we had also ended up promising each other the plan for all out next outings.. i.e we have to experience all the adventure this land offers (Scuba diving, snorkelling, jet skiing, surfing and all other water sports, paragliding, parasailing, hot air balloon, sand dune bashing, desert safari, dolphin stuff and there is much more) what fun! Just a mention is enough to charge the freaks that we are! only miss having some friends with similar interests.. It adds to the adventure when u have company besides the discounts offered to groups on the deals, which is also in my jobless mind :P

Anyways, for now I offer you a sneak peek into the album I uploaded with the pics of the day.

That was our valentines day...

Hope you like browsing through them.

Tales of a housewife..

I tried the most typical wifely thing today. guess what!

I took the roti n saag to the farms where the man of the house had been toiling in the soil err sands... yes, something on these lines I did today and had a day well spent!

& What made me do that is a story of our laziness and time miss-management but all's well that ends well, so lets not talk of that. Here is what I had cooked.

Best thing was having lunch together (you somehow dont feel like having lunch when u are alone at home) and besides that, got my visa-medical done, checked out a mall that has a sky effect created indoor and also saw another part of Dubai. The more I see it more I like it. Its an amazing land. & The weather has also been kind to me till now. So of this amazing land I was talking - Its one of the examples of what human hard work and creative mind can do to a endless desert. Green lawns, beds of flowers in all possible colors, trees wherever possible - nothing could have been a reality without the metiulous effort of people. For every filament of green life, there is a perfectly laid source of water. And I loved to see this effort bearing such beautiful fruit all around.

Coming back to the wifely thing that I did, reminds me of the blr days when this man of the house used to bring home cooked lunch to my workplace & we had some nice lunches together exploring places around my office & giving headaches to my office people with my absence :) 

2008, Travel- VOF (Day2)

on the way to Valley of Flowers and Hemkund!...

Day 2) Rudraprayag – Joshimath: (110 km)

This GMVN rest house in Rudraprayag has the best location, with most of the rooms facing the confluence of river Alaknanda and Mandakini. The two rivers coming here have different colour, speed & maybe depth but when they get into each other its such a source of energy and revival that I could have spent all the next 8 days here simply looking at the gushing water.

A relaxed morning in and a around the guesthouse with nature walk, yoga and sinful aaloo paranthas, and we were ready for a drive from Rudrapayag to Joshimath. While collecting some chips and cold drinks to avoid ydays mistake, we spotted beautiful ghasiyarans (ladies with bundle of grass-fodder for their domestic animals, on their backs)on the way who smiled sweetly at me and also posed for me to click them.

We must have reached half way through when at the sight of a small fall I asked Amit to stop and we all came out to chk it. It was a natural source of water called “BHEEMDHARA” at chamoli-gopeshwar and looked rather cool and refreshing in otherwise hot sunny afternoon. Walking around this place for a while was enough to set in the mood and these two guys jumped into the water that was chilling cold. M didn’t know swimming but still did not shy away from diving and pulling up some stunts in the water with the help of A. And I enjoyed talking their photos thoroughly.

After that the driver saw a signboard with “DON’T NAG HIM LET HIM DRIVE” written on it and came back on reverse gear to make sure each one of us had seen it too, so we had no choice but to quietly admire the striking beauty of Garwal hills which to me looked like covered with a smooth velvet sheet of green. Next stop was “VRIDH BADRI”. It comes under PanchBadri, 5 shrines of lord Vishnu (Vishal Badri –Badrinath being the main and biggest of all, Yogdhyan Badri, Bhavishya Badri, Vridha Badri, Adi Badri). The priest and care taker of that place narrated the significance of Vridh Badri to us, its the oldest of all and there is a small village setup around it where I played with a calf on our way back to the road which was 50 mtrs uphill.

The drive today was eventful I must admit. The next in line was a fully loaded truck whose driver for the lack of luck had lost its control and that caused a traffic jam on this narrow route. Every time he would accelerate, it would only move to slip back instead of moving up ahead. I guess the breaks were not working and after several trials he was now positioned in such a way that if he tried once more & failed, the truck would fall off the road straight down the hill. That indeed was scary and we prayed for safety of all at that point. The truck was being controlled/stopped by means of a brick behind the back tyres. Some fellow travellers got down, gave ideas and offered help to at least move the truck thus unblocking the way and easing the traffic. We moved on and it started drizzling then changing our frame of mind into something better.

We had planned that if we reach Joshimath before 6 pm, we will drive further to Govindghat which is 20 km ahead, the same day & save time. We were told that one cant travel between Joshimath and Govindghat throughout the day for safety and control related reasons. There are set timings when vehicles are allowed to go and we got to know that the latest in a day is 4.30pm. So we had to spend that night at Joshimath.

With no prior bookings, the evening was spent in looking around for a decent place to stay (GMVN was all booked.) and we did get a nice acco with geyser and parking for a very low cost. One takes these amenities for granted in the planes but as you go higher(at least in this part of the world), every bucket of hot water comes with a price tag. Tales of that and of charging your mobiles or camera later as you read on... Today before we slept, we had a sumptuous dinner at one of the two competing restaurants on the main road @ Joshimath, had a long walk back home- holding hand and umbrella simultaneously in rain, sat inside the warm cosy razai and chatted for long over our lives back home plus office, people we love and hate etc.

Here is a view from our room @ joshimath..

I will not spoil the attractiveness(if at all I could make it so, in words, for you) of this journey so far by mentioning that before sleeping I also had to buy a medicine to fight my irksome stomach that refuses to be healthy whenever I don’t get my luxurious home loo :( so I have to take special care while travelling. When we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore, we went to sleep with an alarm for 5.30am. Next day was going to be tiresome with the long trek to do.

WORD OF ADVICE – Just tell yourself that you are on vacation and relax.. Keep clicking and indulge in everything that u miss doing otherwise. If your objective is to reach the destination, you can travel by any mode but the best way to enjoy the journey is when u travel by private vehicle and if you want to drive on your own, please drive carefully!! Doing some stretching exercises in between is also recommended.

2008, Travel- VOF (kick start)

Valley of Flowers and Hemkund!

This post is about THE HIGHLIGHT of our 2008 travel. Kind of “once in a life time” for me. Its about our Trek to Valley Of Flowers, which is a national park & a spectacular paradise of wild flowers in India (Uttaranchal). To begin with, let me mention that its going to be a rather long post, unless I suffer from lack of words to describe the experience OR I decide to split it into parts for better reading. All good things come at a price and here I am talking about some gruelling trekking but then the rewards make it all worth.

I will take one day at a time, it was between 9^th Aug to 16^th Aug, 08. Here is the start, the very first day.

Day 1) Delhi to Roorkee, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Devprayag, Srinagar & finally stopping at GMVN guesthouse at Rudraprayag for night stay(Here is a view from .the room we stayed in.)

It started @ around 3.30 am (*please don’t call us crazy), with me driving from our home in Naraina till that big signal at Vikas Marg. Then I gave the controls to the **driver. A stop at “Cheetal” for a misty morning walk around the deer, feeding the rabbits and having a cup of tea, then we sped on to have breakfast at roorkee. I love the bustling serenity of Haridwar, M had a vague memory of being there as a kid and A wanted to pickup some music; so we parked the car, got out for a stroll around the ghat and nearby Haridwar market area till all 3 of us were contented. After that we only stopped for photography here and there while going in reverse Ganges flow around Rishikesh. Huge mountains, thick green vegetation, terraced farming, river full of life, refreshing pure air. These were the scenes and there were also a few land slides on those sharp bends of the road. The treat to our eyes had only begun but it was already mesmerizing. The speedometer got influenced by a sign board that read “aisi bhi kya jaldi hai”. We enjoyed each moment and did not realise that we had skipped the lunch time. When hunger pangs started striking, thought of stopping at some eatery came to the minds but there was nothing in sight. To try our luck we got down to a quiet place “Jayal resort” (I didn’t know the name then, but today while writing I was being guided by the pics we took & I zoomed in this one to find it was a resort with a name too) but there was no one to attend us at the reception. After some looking around, there came a boy telling us there is nothing available, however we can pick up the mangoes fresh from the tree at the reception :).

It was raining cats n dogs in Delhi but the sun GOD was supporting our trip with a bright shine over us here, so much so that I had to put the sun shields on all the car windows to have the AC effect intact. On such trips I am the one ensuring that nobody misses the cosiness of home, you see. Anyways, the mangoes we picked up were not ripe but I still kept them inside my small home in there and we moved on, later picking up some bhajiya n samosa’s near devprayag-srinagar route and then stopped only at our destination for the day @ Rudraprayag. Prayag means confluence of rivers. We wanted to reach Rudraprayag safely before its dark and 40 km in the Garwal hills can mean anything between 2-3 hours.

We reached there at dot six pm, nice staff, not too high rentals, but wait, we thought we lost something during movement of our bags from the car to the room. was it someone’s goggles, spectacles, cell or something else, I cant recall now. Anyways, we being tired of a really long road drive (yes, inspite of the drive being so very beautiful), we took hot water bath in turns, took short naps, read the maps for the journey ahead, relaxed watching the aarti happening in the small temple at the confluence and clicking pictures and viewing those taken during the day. We unfortunately had to keep deleting the not so best ones as we were not carrying any additional data storage and had a full week ahead where we would be tempted even more to capture every view, every moment on the camera. I regretted not carrying the extra memory card but we still managed to have around 700 pics. I couldn’t even upload them all on picasa for sharing, so there were rounds of elimination and selection with the ones we clicked.

WORD OF ADVICE – keep snacks handy, sun block n shades are recommended, travel with additional storage for ur camera and book this place in advance if u wish to spend the night at Rudraprayag(which u must) and lastly, eat at the guesthouse only as outside there is no decent eating option here.

I wonder..

I have made a blog friend!! 

So far, have interacted with this friend through blog comments only but to me this is enough to feel good with. I am not asking the friend to acknowledge or to reciprocate any of my feelings.

I am just wondering about blogosphere (not sure if I spelled the term right), its a world in itself...

Unsure of my regularity in pouring out the crap here once I am with Amit(life gets busy u see, ahem ahem.. ) but I have realised that I do need at least one channel to connect online. Because when I quit orkut few months back, my love for blog reading surfaced. Thankfully. Orkut was a sheer waste of time after a point, its great to find all your old pals (school, college, neighbourhood etc etc) and I did that, but besides that nothing much. On blogs, I have read the journey of people, their point of view on n number of things under the sun and beyond, humour filled expression for simplest of feelings, the power of words in a nut shell. All this is inspiring. Dunno how but it is, for me.! 

Maybe this also speaks of an aspect of my personality.

Seeing the huge gang of blogger friends, makes me wonder how they manage it though.. as soon as they publish a post, comments start pouring in. I am serious when I say I would find it difficult to keep track of them and reply aptly to each one of their comments. 

With moderation ON, it must be really taking them good part of their time. So here is a round of applause to all those bloggers for managing their readers so well(including this new found friend of mine)

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my phone just rang while i was wondering about all this.. what adds to my speculation is "how can he think of getting on an ironing board if he can't find anything else to reach that high point on the wall?" 

In the mid of our conversation, he mentions of the mess in the house and the need to buy some furniture n stuff including IRON BOARD. 

"But I saw one when u recently sent me our new home pictures" I said. 

Having poor luck at that moment, he quickly got caught and told me the truth. he he.. glad he has not broken his knee at least. 

There is not one but many such incidents that keep me healthy and I know he is not gonna spare me for sharing it here.

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