Cool Dubai and some cold..

So I finally get a Hindustan Lever Stamp (read it as leaver my dear). Thats what i was told when i was at the airport.

Yesss! I am in dubai, the land of sun and sand as some call it.

& it snowed in some parts here, the day I landed. What a cool welcome..

Let me start with my worry of packing my stuff(literally spread all over the house in mumbai) into the 20 kg baggage as i mentioned earlier. I didnt want to bring anything extra because past experience tells me that 70% of my clothes dont see the light outside my suitcase/cupboard. Sweetly enough, Mom helped by arranging for a spring balance. I removed my warm clothes, heavy punjabi suits, few more sarees and some old casuals etc and managed to come with only 5 kgs extra.

Isn't that good management? Now other side of story is that I had stuffed my laptop bag, cabin bag and purse/handbag as much as possible as they are not weighed. But my heart weakened at the mumbai immigration counter to read on a board that only 2 bags are allowed (including laptop/cabin/hand bag) so quickly filling the immigration form, I arranged max of my purse's contents into the cabin bag but where would i put the purse itself? it wasnt small enough to be put inside any other bag so i might have to leave it at the airport. Being my first international flight I was little apprehensive. I had also heard that rules are strictly followed in international airports. But I was nowhere questioned abt anything. & I landed with all my luggage intact.

I must mention this as well. Husband had expressed his devout side to my mum and asked for Tulsi plant to be sent along with me. Now would I be able to carry it? The driver suggested that I tell the authorities (incase they question) that its a medicinal herb that I am carrying. But I tell you, its a problem only when u ask someone whether you can carry or not. I packed it in a long tube like container and kept inside the check-in bag and forgot abt it. 

That too reached here safely.

On the flight, I got a window seat and kept looking down, clicking pics from there too. The view of ships in the sea through the clouds from top was captivating and strengthened the place of 'a vacation on cruise' in my wish list. & then an idea of a desert safari as soon as we crossed the Arabian sea and came over the endless deserts. 

Enjoying the beauty infrastructure of roads and buidlings we landed at 4pm. Didnt spend much time @ the airport but that was beautiful too. I found the eye test sheer waste of time though. The flight took me 2 & a half hours and the formalities at the airport took another 2 hours. The heavy laptop bag and cabin bag were being carried on all these 2 hours. So, by the time I came out and looked for Amit, I was totally tired but still was all smiling at the sight of him.

Yesss.. I have finally reached here all well :) I hope this move across the geography prove good for us in all ways.

The warm welcome by the darling husband was lovely. He afterall had been waiting to get his laundry and other things taken care of :p and now that my visa says "Housewife" as occupation, he doesnt leave a single chance to giggle over it and tease me.

We had an amazing first weekend roaming around some malls and Jumeira beach by the sun set. & Some friends from this land have just given baby news so there are plans to meet them soon.

Its gonna be fun setting up everything all over again but the cold waves have hit me hard and I have been shivering and feeling feverish for the whole of today :( 

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.

20 kg limit... phew!!!

My Mom has been behind me to sort things and decide what is really really needed to be taken along. And I dread the thought of having to dispose any of my small/comfy stuff futher especially after having done that already and that too, heavily, once when I was leaving Delhi... (Ruby, my maid must be happy to collect all my punjabi suits, t-shirts :(.. n what not) and we also went to a set of street families to distibute our winder clothes and other stuff.. The matter of concern therefore is that the Internation flight allowing 20+7 kgs whereas same airlines in domestic flight had a 30+7 kg baggage allowed.

After much of elimination and selection, I came to mumbai with a 3 8 k g checked in bag, a h e a v y cabin bag that I am sure was more than 12 kgs but didnt get checked for wgt thankfully, a s t u f f e d laptop bag, my b i g hand bag and another small carry bag which had my bamboo shoots and a glass bowl. Even though the lady at the Air India check-in counter gave me an option of bribing her(not at the counter, pls go to the loo, fold the money between paper and leave it on my table - this is what she shamelessly told me) with Rs 1000 and carry the excess, I demanded a recpt and paid the actuals. I dont know if these things happen abroad too, but it is totally shamefull.

This time, I have selected the cheapest flight so that I can compensate for the price, If I have to pay, for any excess baggage to my next destination(Dubai) but the tricky thing is to reduce the 40 odd kgs to 20 something when I know I must have added 10 more kgs with my shopping in Mumbai :(

Its going to be another painstaking exercise.. phew!!

2008, Travel- Part I

Some places visited in 2008 & loved them all.

There was news of snow fall in Nainital when we went there in Jan. This is Naini Lake taken from the flat side.

In Feb, went to Kolkata to train someone, I literally forced her an early morning to take me around  the city. Thats when I captured the famous Victoria Memorial.

Climbed Vaishno Devi on foot and came back riding ponies on Holi weekend, couldnt stop clicking this monkey for its intelligence.

Lansdowne peaceful hillstation in uttaranchal, reached there after a 295 km drive from Delhi.

Loved the peace, beauty and solitariness of this beautiful late called Khurpatal at 12 km from Nainital.

GOA - HR Offsite, need I say more :). Posting another pic below...

...bcoz impression of Goa without water is not complete.

Then in Aug, we went on our long awaited and planned long trip to Valley of Flowers and Hemkund Sahib. 3 of us (Me, Amit and Manu-my bro) by car covered garwal and kumaun in our round trip.. 

It was Truely Awesome! Have been wanting to summarise the experience in a travelogue but being lazy. For now, putting up few pics below & in part II ( as uploading/arranging more images here is becoming a task :o).

... to be contd.