Shot handheld at 55mm for 1/8″ at f/4.0 with the EF-S 55-250mm IS on a Canon XSi. Not processed except for cropping.

Conjunction: Moon, Venus, Jupiter

“In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”…

Indeed Raskolnikov, the character whose idea is expressed here, goes beyond giving the extraordinary men the right to transgress the law. Enough to say that it is that person’s duty to transgress the law if he sees it necessary to express himself. Wonderful.

If we are to have a society of people with a sense of entitlement and people without, why not codify that into law. After all, when was the last time you heard of a powerful politician brought down through the action of law (police, courts) without the intervention of the media or the laity?

Baby elephants playing in the water

The next day saw us heading out early for Dubare elephant camp. This is a place they bring wild elephants to be trained. Each morning, the elephants are herded into the river and bathed. When I say bathed it is more like a hard scrubbing down. The picture above shows two youngsters playing in the water. One was trying to dunk the other in the river. In many ways, the playfulness of human and animal children are the same…

They allow anyone to join in the washing for a fee (100 rupees). Once done, the elephants are cajoled into standing up and led up the (small) hill to be fed. Each elephant has its location around a square walled enclosure. Only its head reaches above the wall, and in the case of the babies only their trunks. A cooked mixture of ragi and horsegram is fed to them as round balls. One youngster was making a whole Oliver Twist scene of it. Each time he got a bit, he would immediately put his trunk out for more. The older ones knew that their turn would come and waited patiently. A large pig wandered in and decided to try his luck, but the keepers kept shooing him away.

Elephants need to eat about an eighth of their body weight every day. That is about 250 kilograms of food. So they pretty much spend their entire day eating.

Tip to anyone planning to make this trip: the bathing starts pretty early, by about 9:30 in the morning; and the feeding happens around 10:30. So plan on getting there on time. There will be a few minutes wasted in the parking lot and taking a boat across to the camp. Another reason to reach a little earlier.

After the elephant camp, we headed to Kaveri Nisarga Dhama. This is a sort of ecological park created in an island on the Kaveri. There is a deer camp and various other things to keep people busy. The island is about 9 km from Dubare and it makes sense to combine the visits. As we had seen our fill of deer at Nagarhole, we stayed a little off the beaten track and spent a bit of time in a small clearing cum river bed. With summer around the corner, the amount of water was limited. It was a wonderful and relaxing experience.

That evening we went to the Tibetan golden temple at Bylanakuppe. Perhaps the Tibetans like Coorg because it too is a plateau with hills strewn around and reminds them of their homeland. So they have erected a nice temple and have a monastery around. In the evening light, the temple really glowed. The temple is close to Nisarga Dama and it makes a lot of sense to add this to the same morning trip, but here is a tip again. If you are not rushed don’t combine these. The golden temple is best seen in the evening light as the natural warming light sets off the colours beautifully. It will also be more comfortable to walk around (no shoes allowed) in the evening than at noon.

You will see sign boards advertising low calling rates to Tibet & monks walking around taking on their mobile phones. The first sight of this takes one off guard!

Bonfire being set up for Holi, Bombay, India

The story of the bonfire is that Prahalad was going to be killed by his father Hiranyakashipu with the help of his aunt Holika. As Holika would not be harmed by fire, she sat on a bonfire and invited her nephew to sit on her lap. Prahalad was saved by Vishnu and Holika was burned to death.

Photograph taken with my Galaxy Note. This phone rocks!

No thanks!
This is the actual name of a water supply company in Bombay. Why in heaven’s name would you call your water supplies company pee pee?
Photo taken through the dirty windscreen of my car, so pardon the dirty look. Camera phones seem to have so much depth of field that even the glass and the dirt on it is in focus.

Coffee Bloom - Smells like jasmine

[I am moving the pictures to the single post page to avoid over-cluttering the main page with photos.]

On day three, we had a morning nature walk at Glenlorna where we went down through the tea plantation (fearful of snakes and fearful of slipping down the slopes) to a nice little glen (see this is where the name comes from). There were many birds about and after much sweating and bird watching, we headed back. Birds seen on this walk included drongos, the red crested bulbul and a particularly slow red bird whose name I cannot recall now.

Then we headed to the coffee estate of Woshully. Now we were getting into the real deal of Coorg. I mean, who really goes to Coorg and not see the coffee estates, huh? In the afternoon we headed out for a Jeep ride around the estate. This particular Jeep had a working engine, some seats and that was basically it. Its suspension seemed to be a rod connected directly from the wheels to my seat. And less said about the door locks the better (the door could not be opened using the door handle on the outside for starters).

Most of the photos here are from that ride. We saw some spectacular sights around including coffee trees in full bloom. Coffee flowers (who knew they flower, right?) are bright white and smell of jasmine. Apparently the smell is strong enough to force some residents out during this season. If it rains, great. Else they need to be irrigated. Following irrigation, the trees bloom. A few days later, the bloom withers and the berry begins to grow. The berries need about seven to nine months to ripen, meaning that there is only one harvest each year. The ripe berries are dried, pulped (the pulp is removed and the bean is extracted), and sent for processing into the nice aromatic morning coffee that you drank today. The pulp is used as manure after drying.

Incidentally there is no coffee smell anywhere. Until the bean is roasted, there is no smell of coffee at all. In addition, there are only two main varieties of coffee – robusta and arabica. The term peaberry is used for a berry that contains only one bean. Normally there are two beans – each being a half sphere. A peaberry is a full sphere about the size of a pea, hence the name. Our Jeep driver said that this was rather like normal coffee having a “male” and “female” bean and the peaberry is like a eunuch or hermaphrodite (the word he actually used was hijra). The driver spoke with a heavy mallu accent, so I leave it to your imagination how hijra sounded in his pronounciation of the word.

We also saw other plants & trees – notably cotton, pepper (creeper), tamarind, and vanilla – and birds. There are birds everywhere in Coorg. If you just sat in one place, eventually all the birds will pass by in front of you. In this ride, we managed to see malabar ducks, bee eaters and egrets. I read somewhere on the web that a quarter of all bird species in India can be found in Coorg. I can’t dispute that!

Venus and Jupiter will get closer over the next few days and on March 13 will be the closest to each other. In this trip, I managed to see the Moon setting just after the Sun (seen here) and rising just ahead of the Sun (five days previously, photo below). That photo was taken with the DSLR and a superwide lens (Canon EF-S 10-22mm), so the difference in quality can be really seen.

Day two at Glenlorna saw us wake up to cold weather. The heat of the previous day’s afternoon seemed so far away. As the photos above show, it was a misty morning with the trees themselves looking like ghosts floating through the white. When the sun rose, it looked like it was the moon. So dense was the morning fog. As a matter of fact, this was the only day we saw this density of vapour. By the next day it was much more the normal mist one sees in hill stations.

The morning was spent in a tour of the tea factory. The processing of tea involves drying the leaves and then several stages of curing and whatnot till the tea appears as various qualities to be packed. The best stuff (leaf tea) all the way down to the dust tea, which is used to fill tea bags. So the next time you use a tea bag remember that this tea is the worst quality of the lot.

In the afternoon we took off for Irpu falls, which we found was pretty crowded. The entry fee was quite steep (with two separate entry charges). For all the money there are no facilities there at all. Nevertheless the falls themselves were quite nice to see. We avoided climbing to the top section where the crowd was gathered and opted to stop at a smaller cascade. That is where the picture of the rainbow in the water comes from. The other snap, of the water running smooth as silk, also comes from the same area. I am pretty happy with this picture which was a 2 second shot taken handheld.

Then it was off to Nagarhole and a safari in a broken down old bus. It is a wonder we saw any animals at all. All animals should have been warned off for miles with the racket the engine was making, if not the racket being made by the passengers some of who were very drunk. Nevertheless we did manage to see several kinds of deer (spotted, sambar, barking), turtles, bison, elephant, some small birds, peacocks and monkeys. The only rare / interesting species was the malabar squirrel which is red and has a nice red bushy tail.

Getting in to Coorg is an experience in itself. You can fly in to Bangalore or Mangalore (the only scheduled flight into Mysore has not been operational since last November thanks to Kingfisher’s financial troubles). Mangalore airport is closer but apparently the roads are pretty bad, so we went in via Bangalore. Unfortunately we had to go across the city and it took us over close to three hours in doing just that. Given that Bangalore airport seems to be located half way to Hyderabad, that may not seem so bad at all…

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On the way is this pretty little village called Chennapatna which specializes in toys, especially wooden ones. The highway is dotted with shops selling all manner of rocking horses, small puzzles like jigsaws, and pictures which are not painted but in which wood of different colour is used to give an impression of paint.

Having reached Bangalore airport at around 9 in the morning, we finally managed to reach Hudikeri and the Glenlorna tea estate by 5.45 pm, over 8 hours of road trip to cover about 250 kilometres.

Glenlorna is interesting in that it is the only tea estate in all of Coorg. Tea requires a different altitude and climate compared to coffee which is everywhere in the area. Another difference is that tea is grown with the bushes open to the sun, while coffee needs shade. So the tea estate was the only “non-forest” area we saw. Still it is not without tree cover as a couple of pictures above show. They prefer to grow Silver Oaks which are among the few trees they are allowed to cut down and sell. It is prohibited to cut down most forest wood.