Italian vacation – some salient features of Italy

From the industrial Milan down to the eternal city of Rome, onward to the birth place of Renaissance Florence and then to the island city of Venice. The above sentence sums up our Italy trip this Thanksgiving. While a travel log is in process, I figured I will highlight some of the key takeaways from the trip related to culture and general stuff about Italy.

• Download the App “Rick Steve's Audio Europe”, it has detailed talks and explanations of a lot of locations in Italy. Listening to the audio before and during the visit to a location helped us immensely with understanding Italy better
• Lots of public bathrooms but no free bathrooms, usage costs varies from Euro 0.80 to Euro 1.50. Another interesting thing is that there are no urinals per se in the men’s restrooms and only sit down toilets. All the rest rooms were pristine and well maintained. As a tour guide pointed out, you are better off buying a Gelato or a coffee and using the rest-room rather than paying the fee for rest room usage.  
• Restaurants charge a cover-charge for getting you seated. typically about Euro 2.00 per person. While on the topic of restaurants, unlike USA, there is no free water and they sell water in bottles. Come to think of it, I couldn't understand the fascination of Italians about carbonated water aka sparkling water.
• If your hotel provides breakfast either included or at a charge (typically euro 3,00-5,00 per person) blindly take it. Keep in mind, kids eat free in most hotels.   
• One of the great things about Italy is the coffee and cafe's. Cappuccino at an Italian cafe beats the Starbucks coffee any day any time. Here also, if possible just order coffee for drinking at the cafe instead of to go. Unlike America the to-go coffee (if available) costs about 2x the price of in cafe drinking
• We mostly used public transport in Rome and very little to nothing in Florence. If you are in Rome for 2-3 days and you don't intend to visit all museums I still recommend the Roma Pass. 
• The high speed trains are amazing and they run on-time, the train platform numbers are assigned 15 minutes before scheduled time. If your budget allows I recommend upgrading to slightly higher level tickets instead of barebones cheapest ticket (just a personal choice).      
• We climbed up 3 domes while in Italy and it was all well worth it. It is a tough climb but worth the time. 
• Vatican museums, if you can afford take a guided tour, it is expensive but in our experience we appreciated the museum exhibits and Michael Angelo's work at Sistine Chapel much better thanks to our tour guide. The guide was so good that she managed to keep our 9 year old also engaged throughout the tour 
• All 3 cities had a flavor of its own, Rome had the big city and the things that comes with big cities. Florence had the small town feel and Venice was Venice.  
• Again, unlike USA, the default way Pizzas are given uncut and many a times we had to request the restaurant to get it cut. Also, there is no thin and original crusts in Italy, most everything we saw were thin crusts and very few thick or regular crusts
• There are 2 transport buses from Venice island to Marco-Polo airport, one is ACTV and other is ATVO. ACTV is the company that operates vaporetto (the grand canal public boat) and ATVO only transports to airport. Tickets to ATVO bus can either be bought online or from driver. Both services cost $8 but I recommend using ATVO for it is a non stop bus to airport and only 20 minutes ride.
• For rest of Italy, kids under 10 have free bus rides and train rides but for Venice where the age drops to 6      
• Bread in Florence is baked with no salt, the reason being a historic fight more than a few centuries ago with neighboring port city of Pisa, when city of Pisa refused to sell salt to Florence and from then on restaurants in Florence are baking bread without salt. 
• The only place we encountered where Google Maps were almost useless was Venice, they work in terms of showing the locations but don't trust their driving/walking directions fully. They apparently have come a long way but feel they still have a long way to go. 
• Read this in Frommer's guide to Italy, apparently you can be fined for buying contraband leather goods. 
• Talking of leather goods, we found Venice to be a better place to shop for leather than the capital of leather Florence. 
• Subway system in Rome runs on time, smoothly and granted bit crowded to my desire but it works. I can't say the same for bus system in Rome. Rule of thumb, if a place you intend to visit is 15-20min walk, just take the walk and don't wait on the buses. 
• Uffizi gallery in Florence is one of the few museums we visited. Recommend to buy tickets at least a day or so in advance that way you can schedule a time to get into the museum. 
• Talking og Uffizi, they have some strange rules. They will not allow you to carry back packs into the museum and have to be stored in the museum storage area. Next one if you rent audio guides they want to keep your passport as collateral. They check tickets both going in and coming out. So, don't throw your tickets once you are inside the museum.  
• Don't know if it is specific to Florence or for Italy in general, the milk we bought in the grocery store had an expiry date 2 days from the selling date and there were no gallon sized but liter size. 
• Breakfast cereals unlike our local HEBs there were only 3 choices or may be 4 :) 
• I cannot end this without mentioning a word about Gondola's; its not worth the money :)   

Ios Maps vs Google Maps India

Recently when we went to Bengaluru, we took our beloved unlocked iPhone 4s with us (idea was to try with an Indian Sim card) to help us with phone access during our vacation. With the data plan we figured we could use the navigation also. Considering the charging of the phone is such a problem in India, I was hoping against hope that the built-in maps of iOS aka Apple maps would work for in US, I have found them to be battery saver and have come a long way since introduction. 

As they say, India is completely different dynamics at play and the Apple maps I was so hopeful about was up to no good. I had to change tactics and rely on Google maps. I wasn't expecting this extreme of a difference but Google maps are a few light years ahead of Apple maps. 

In places where Apple maps was struggling with GPS lock on my location,  Google map was able to give me point to point and turn by turn directions including details on service roads and one way too. 

With the driver we had hired for Bangalore trip, we survived solely thanks to Google Maps.

On the same note, traffic overlays on Google maps is extremely accurate and I admit I have a new found respect for Austin traffic after encountering Bangalore traffic.

So, a piece of advice if you are interested in taking your iPhone to India make sure it has Google Maps.     

  

Images from Dubare camp

All images captured with Canon Xsi with 24-105 F/4 lens in manual mode. No editing whatsoever.   

Doggy camp and boarding

Recently when we had to go on our vacation, most of the stuff related to vacation like tickets, accommodations and attractions were done in advance. But this time around unlike last time we had a family member who wasn't going to accompany us on our trip and of course she is not able to handle herself by herself either, no she is not old or bed ridden, in fact she is young at heart and in body too. Yes you guessed it right, it was our pet daisy.

Thanks to our Circle C Ranch Facebook page I found a few dog highly recommended dog boarding places that I short listed to checkout

In general

• There are a lot of dog boarding places in and around our neighborhood
• 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the busiest times and
• The cost of boarding is in the range of $30-$35/day
• I can’t comment about the business side but almost all the places I visited had decent number or a lot of dogs
• Most dog boarding places are plain boarding places and that means they provide a semi private indoor place for your pet and let them out every 3 to4 hours for 10-15mins and put them back inside
• They in general won't allow group play for dogs or more than required time outside the kennels
• Some places were ridiculous, they were quoting extra $15-$20 for 10-15mins of group play in a day.
• One of the places even offered a doggie massage and also human time instead of group time, that would be $10-$20 for 15mins
• The same place also offered nature walk for the pup but 10mins walk would cost $15, considering I take my dog out for 40minute walk in the morning and something similar in the evening, 10minutes sounded ridiculous
• After seeing the other places out there, day camp and boarding at our neighborhood petsmart looks very primitive (no outdoor space and cramped play space)
• Of all the places I visited best I liked was Dog Camp in Dripping Springs and next one was Bobby Colorado training camp

Since I couldn’t get Dog Camp, I had to board her at Bobby Colorado. At the end of 10 days, my pup looked happy and I admit had lost some weight but nothing to worry about.

Impressions from Mexico

When my dear friend suggested that we should get together sometime this year and we should plan  for a week or so and ideal would be an all inclusive resort, my thoughts were Caribbean or Cancun. Since we had a few friends who had earlier visited Cancun we decided with the same.

The all inclusive was the best and it was the first time for us in an all inclusive  resort which took us close to a day to get used to, but this blog is not about that.

Here are some of my take-away from the trip

• The blue waters and the white sand beaches are truly mind blowing. My best experience was to keep the window open through the night just so I could hear the ocean. The temperature was near perfect 80F through out the stay
• We hardly had to use it but the public transportation facility is very good.
• Being in the resort we are always shielded from real Mexico. Step outside and take a few steps up and down and one gets to see real Mexico
• I felt Mexico lives on bargain, there were multiple layers of agents for every single activity we planned (Chichen Itza, Islas Mujaras, parasailing and water ski). In some sense they have adopted capitalistic system for their tourist attractions.
• As always, the bigger the group and longer we persisted the better negotiating power we had.
• The visit to the Mayan village of Chitchen Itza reminded me of a stroll in our native in India, granted the main roads were much better paved than in India.
• Far too many Indians have visited Chichen Itza as it is evident from the fact that the local sellers were greeting us with "namaste, accha price"
• The tour guides while booking promise you that they will start at 7:45AM from hotel and be back by 7:00PM in the night but in my experience the start time is right but the end time will be closer to 8:45PM, I highly recommend this trip though.
• Outside the resort, I felt the everything had a different rate for tourists vs locals(just like India, not the pharmacy though)
• Islas Mujaras is overrated, when we negotiated the tour to the island the guy was very particular "no swimming with dolphins, only seeing them", I think he failed to mention that we will be in the boat itself when we see the Dolphins.
• It's hard to believe, but the restaurant we went while on the island the food was cooked on an open flame stove using wood as fuel, yes the food had a barbecue flavor to it.
• At the cost of being too harsh to the island, I won't recommend this specially with young kids. Unless you have an insatiable penchant for snorkeling and would do it at any cost.
• There is also the activity of holding the baby shark, that felt like animal cruelty and human rights violations than anything fun.
• I think The island is very very poor and lives on tourist income only, the evidence was when they said pesos 5 to use bathroom to change clothes.
• The resort we stayed from vegetarian perspective always had great breakfast and lunch selection but dinner was so so, come to think they have no other restaurants open for breakfast, 1 for lunch and 5 for dinner. Keep in mind this might be true for your resort also.

Needless to say the best part of the whole trip was catching up with old friends and making some new friends (as young as 2 year), The ocean and the beach were all secondary.

Chichen-itza, the place of Maya

The place is one of the most famous tourist destinations in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, it is famous for its monumental constructions and the history behind it. It stands as an example for the Mayan supremacy over astronomy and math.

From what our tour guide described to us, the civilization lasted for over 500 years and through out most of that time they kept building and building and used slave labor to do the same. They developed elaborate rituals to perform the sacrifices and believed the more elaborate the ritual is gods would be pleased better and bestow us with great rains and harvest. I have a theory for this, but I don’t want to put it in the public domain. All wonderful and great for their times and might also would have worked during their times.

Again from what our guide told us, Mayans were like Romans (believed in destruction and conquests) but lacked the knowledge of metals and used wood for everything. If that is true, I am impressed by the knowledge they had about the wood itself.

The structures are plain amazing, specially the main pyramid in Chichen Itza and the way a clap echo's back as bird screaming (a dragon in their case) is beyond any numerology.

The questions that arose in my mind were of a different type, how come the civilization that were so good in math and astronomy that built such great observation towers lacked the understanding that destruction of forest leads to loss of rain.

Granted there were a council of very smart and intelligent people in those times who passed on their learning in astronomy to their next generations, for I do not believe the great pyramid was built in 1 go and there were multiple iterations of the same which were slightly imperfect. I wonder if this what led to the belief that Mayan’s were building for ever to please the gods?

Was there a lack of leadership which could have encourage other forms of science to develop?, its hard to believe that a developed mind like that would have been stuck in one field for that long. As per our guide the lack of food lead to destruction of the Mayans of Yucatan as due to their arrogant nature, they had amassed enough and more enemies among other tribes, even before the Spaniards came.

Looking at the Spaniards destruction of the Mayan temples and places of worship reminded me of the Muslim invasion of India and destruction of our temples. I guess human beings are the same irrespective of their religion.

Innocence of the child

After nearly 15 years and for the first time ever for my 3 year old daughter we are celebrating Diwali in India. Diwali means crackers and if you are familiar with India the moment you start crackers in front of your house you will have bunch of kids dressed in ragged clothes standing in front of your house begging you to share some crackers with them. If you are born and brought up in India you know to ignore these kids as yielding to one means  you are opening flood gates for the rest of the gang to appear.

But for my daughter it was the other way, she was enjoying the crackers with us and some other young kids from the neighborhood and the moment she saw these street kids she became very excited and said “hey look other kids, come join us”, “everybody say hi”. The funny part was we were forced to share some of\our crackers just to send them away.

Thanks to my daughter we managed to do some charitable act, though a small one. I don’t know how long will this innocence will last but is fun till it lasts.   

Economic percolation

I remember back in my engineering days when Dr. Manmohan SIngh (current PM of India) had started the process of liberalizing the economy with the idea of more job growth and greater economic strength. By the time I left India to US I was able to witness the economic growth mostly in the technical field (aka software and BPO) and during my visits back to India I saw the transformation slowly impacting different strata of the society but never witnessed it reaching all the way to the bottom. This time around I can say it has almost reached all sections of society. Here is how I justify the same.

I have spent most of my time in this vacation in Mysore and went to the famous Mysore Mall (yes Mysore also has a mall now) and to the retail store called More (a retail chain by Birla group). The first time I went to the mall was to buy sandals and the next time was to buy a phone, when went for the sandal shopping I visited quite a few stores and each store had few common features one was a  bunch of young employees in the age group of 18-25 employed to help the customers and each store had a security guard whose duty is to stamp the bill while you are leaving. The second time I went I mostly spent time in the Reliance electronic store and here the ratio of employees to number of aisles was the same as other stores but with a noticeable difference in the age group (wider range than others). I am not sure what they are paid per month from what I heard it is apparently in the range of Rs 6000-10000 per month and since most of these stores are retail chains they also need to provide employee benefits like retirement funds and so on.

The story at More was a different one, the employees seemed mostly direct imports from a near by village. If it were to me I would have guessed that the average age of the employee is 16-18 but my father-in-law noted the fact to me that it is illegal to employ age less than 18. True to the norm in India, there were 1 or 2 employees for each aisle and every few aisles had a uniformed manager. This apart from the cashiers, the security and other managers. 

One can argue that the entry of Dominos and McDonalds had similar impact but in my thinking the scale at which these retail chains are creating jobs is massive to say the least. 

Last but not the least is that the house maid at my in-law’s house managed to lease a house for Rs.125000, keep in mind she is not educated and barely knows how to read and her primary occupation is to work as a maid in multiple houses. One can argue that such cases are rare but I am impressed by the fact that such things do exist.

On one side I am happy to see so many youth being employed but on the other hand I worry as to what is the future career paths for these countless youngsters, will it lead to the same problem USA has in terms of high school dropouts and not many following through to college? something to wonder. 

The magic of Disney

Sometime in May 2013 my company announced a mandatory week long shut down during the July 4th weekend. I was confused as to what to do for a whole week and where to head to and Sandhya suggested Disney world, Orlando. We deliberated for a few minutes and decided to head there for 4 days with 2 days extra for travel. I am glad I did this, at the end of 4 days, none of us wanted to come back and had to literally drag our feet to the airport to return to Austin. 

In my stay in US, I have been to several theme parks (couple of six flags, couple of sea world’s, Hollywood studios and also the Disney Land LA) and before we reached there my impression was this place probably is a mix of Hollywood studios and Sixflags. I was wrong, it was as the name said a magical place. It is probably the one and only theme park that I felt, I wish I had more time to spend here.

As the title of the blog goes we spent more than half of our time in Magic kingdom and the other half was split between Disney Hollywood studios Disney Animal kingdom. My 2 and a half year old was thrilled to meet the characters of Disney like the princesses, fairies, the Mickey the Minnie and Buzz and Woody. She also had a lot of fun dancing in the street parties and also watching the shows. In short she had a blast and so did we. 

One thing to admire Disney is their transportation logistics. To reach magic kingdom we had to go drive the car, raid a tram and then ride a mono rail. All of which was well manned and was very very efficient. I remember coming back one night after the fire works (~10:30PM) and the place was really crowded but it didn’t take us more than 15 mins to reach our cars and the drive out of the parking lot was also real smooth and no congestion what so ever. Considering the scale of operation they have in Disney world, makes me wonder how many people and contractors and temporary workers they need to employ for a smooth operation of the place. Their fast pass system also deserves some appreciation, if utilized properly can save a lot of time (Keep in mind they have fast passes for most but not all shows and rides).

The one and only crib I have about Disney is their lack of good food inside the park. They have lot of ice-cream shops but 1 or 2 burger places and 1 or 2 restaurants which typically have a wait time of 45mins or so. If you are a vegetarian like me then the options reduce drastically.      

One piece of advice, if you consider a Disney vacation then do not spend the extra money on options like park hopping and all, from my experience it was a useless thing for we did not have time or energy to jump from park to park.   

I can’t end the blog post without mentioning a word about the FL weather, the months from May to October is what they call the hurricane season and out of the 5 days we were there we had rain on 4 days. The rains won’t last too long but are pretty intense while they last. So, if you are there buy a poncho and keep moving. Also, pick a rainless night and watch the fireworks from magic kingdom and the show right before that (can’t remember the name).

In the end there is no denial it is an expensive vacation, it is a place where you will spend a lot of money on stuff toys and plush toys and all such stuff. Not to exclude the flight tickets, park tickets, the stay and so on but a worthy visit.

When the intentions are strong . . . . .

This incident happened nearly a year ago. Back in 2009 we made a trip to India and in that we had planned to visit the Bangalore Ashram. The reason to visit the ashram was two fold, one was to see the place itself and the other was to buy stuff from the divine shop in the ashram. All was well and we picked a date to visit the ashram and since we were travelling from Mysore to Bangalore we added couple more items to our agenda.

We reached Bangalore as we had planned and thanks to my laid back attitude and inadequate planning, by the time we reached the Ashram there was a satsang about to start and because of which they had closed both the divine shop and the main meditation hall. We were told they will open it after the satsang, we were a bit disappointed but we got to see guruji and that took away half the disappointment. Since we had to return to Mysore the same day we couldn’t wait for the satsang to finish and then the divine shop to open. So, we came back empty handed from the Ashram.

After returning to Mysore, we checked out the local music stores to see if they had any of the CDs we wanted and all we got in return was bad (read angry) customer support. All avenues were closed and I was thinking we should make another trip to Bangalore before we get back to the US.

A day or so later some volunteers from Art of living Mysore came around distributing flyers about their upcoming courses and events. My in-laws took the flyer and kept it on the table. I saw the flyer and I remember making comments on its design and sandhya took it for safe keeping and we forgot all about it as we had a wedding to prepare for (sandhya’s sisters wedding).

One fine evening I had a brain flash and it occurred to me that if the Art of Living Mysore is a big enough chapter, then they probably have their own divine shop and I could get my CDs from there. So, I called the number on the flyer and the lady on the other side was really nice (true with any AOL volunteer whose phone number is listed on the flyer) and she told me that they do not have a divine shop yet but there is something better going on in Mysore. She directed me to Mysore Dasara exhibition where Art of Living foundation had a stall.

Next day evening we strolled to the exhibition grounds and visited the stall, we found all the things we wanted and much much more. I was ecstatic, it had saved my extra trip to Bangalore and since I was in the exhibition grounds I visited the Navakarnataka press stall also and got to pick up couple of books from there as well.

Later It occurred to me, when the intentions are strong, nature will show a way and all I had to do was to energize my brain cells and do a little effort.              

Columbia river gorge drive

The famous Columbia river of Oregon has carved through the mountains and created the gorge and the scenic highway, which was our destination on day 2 of our Portland trip. We started off a bit earlier than previous day and started our drive to the gorge, idea was to drive through the highway and end up at Mt. St Hood by dusk and drive back.    

Columbia river gorge scenic highway is a narrow and windy road that runs parallel to a highway. True to its name, it is scenic, on the  way before entering the gorge itself we witnessed some beautiful farms and view points. Since it was a bit early in the morning the view from the view points were foggy.   

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Driving along the gorge we realized the gorge has a ton of water falls, some big some small, some have nicely built access and some are more obscure.

The first one we stopped at was a small water fall with a short hike, there was a ranger led program going on at the same time we were there. We couldn’t attend the program but managed to hear snippets from the ranger. It was from him that I heard that the gorge has over a 100 water falls.

The next one was a more obscure one with no clear view of the falls and we had to do a couple of miles round trip to clearly view the falls, which we had to pass, but the hiker in us wanted to do at least a small hike and hence we took the small hike to the famous Multnomah falls. The distance was small but it had more ups and downs. Thanks to the rain and the abundant shade in the gorge there were a lot of ferns growing underneath the tall trees. Frankly, I had never seen such lush green fern undergrowth till then. The path had a magic of its own. It took a while for us to reach our destination but it was well worth the time.

Multnomah falls, is the biggest falls on the gorge and a true tourist attraction. It is not as big as the other falls in the world but definitely very scenic. It is a cascade of 2 water falls and a viewing bridge in front of the falls. It is a small hike up to the bridge to view the falls in full glory and the bridge was real crowded. There was a hike going up to top of the falls which we passed. Since it was time for lunch we stopped at the restaurant near the falls for food, being vegetarians the only option we had was the burger and the waitress commented that they get a lot of visitors from Texas and I thought we Texans need some escape from heat every now and then.

Driving along we made a stop at one last water falls called Horse tail falls, Sandhya was very happy to for she could take off her shoes and get her feet wet and I was happy to click pictures of the falls and her. If I remember right, this was the last water fall along the scenic highway and the road merged on to the actual highway after this.          

Driving along the highway towards Mt Hood, we saw the exit for Bonneville Dam and after a couple of moments of hesitation we took it. The dam wasn’t much and Sandhya wasn’t impressed at all. But it was almost full and due to security reasons they didn’t allow us any where on the dam. 

The exit on the road that would have led to Mt Hood was so backed up that we passed Mt Hood and made a U turn and head home. The drive back even though not the official scenic route but it was still pretty and scenic most of the way.

On the next post I will write about Crater Lake and Redwoods.  

Portland trip part – 1 : Rose garden and Japanese garden

Me and Sandhya love traveling and would love to take time off from Austin few times a year. So, when the time came to decide on where do we want to go for this year’s vacation, the choice wasn’t easy to make. Considering Sandhya’s present condition hiking was ruled out and hence most of our favorites were crossed from the list. No California and no Utah left us with east coast or north west coast. We picked the north west when my brother announced that he will be moving to Portland for his new job.

When we landed in Portland, it was a near perfect 70F temperature and the greenery of the place completely impressed me. There were a ton of rose plants planted along the side walks. While in Portland we visited a few places in the city, took a road trip to Crater lake and Redwood national park. Also, did a road trip to Mt St Helens. In this part I will cover the places in Portland.

Rose Garden: My brother who is currently a resident of Portland and had visited the places before mentioned that Portland Rose garden and Japanese gardens were worth a visit.  He also cautioned us that it is off season for roses. We wanted to start the trip slow and easy, we drove to the rose garden. First thing that amazed me was there were a ton of roses for the off peak season and the park visit was free. They had multi colored roses, some specially bred and dedicated to great personalities. they had roses with single layer of petals to roses with multiple layers of petals. I was amazed with both the quality and quantity of roses in the garden. Some of the roses were in bunches while some were individual, some roses were shrubs while some were individual plants.

           

           

          

They truly had some unique colored roses. Considering it was  a weekday and afternoon there were considerable number of tourists in the place. I had to control my shutter finger and see the roses through the naked eyes rather than through the camera lens. The fragrance in the garden is worth mentioning and sad there is no technology to capture the same. It was very colorful and picturesque. I wish I had taken an over all picture of the rose garden to share. Since the garden is on a hill top it also offers a beautiful view of the down town In the end, I recommend rose garden and it is worth the time.

Japanese Garden : Just above the hill top from the rose garden is the famous Portland Japanese garden. There is a small road that we could walk up or there is a free ride shuttle ride to take us up to the park. I have to mention the effort the shuttle driver made to accommodate a handicap women and her scooter into the shuttle, made me think this guy should run for the senate or even better governor. Unlike the rose garden visiting Japanese garden costs money ($10 entry fee). It is a nice place but we weren’t completely blown away by the garden, may be our lack of understanding for Japanese culture or our eyes were colored by such beautiful roses. The garden had some unique and nice things and supposedly one of the Japanese ambassadors to US had told that this place is the most authentic Japanese garden outside Japan.

      

      

They had a few unique things and it was real clean and well maintained. I think we spent less time at the Japanese garden than we spent at the rose garden. After the Japanese garden we thought we would head towards Powell book house but on the way we stopped for coffee and shopped at a locally owned grocery store, which my brother said there were a lot of them in Portland. Finally instead of Powell book house we headed home. 

Day 2 of the trip we headed towards Columbia river gorge.

Agra

Last part of my India travel log. 


Agra is the home for world famous Tajmahal, I was pretty skeptical of the place before I went there but after seeing the place in person, I agree the place has a charm of its own. There are two other buildings in the same complex as TajMahal, one of them is a mosque and the other  one was under renovation. It is one of the well preserved archeological monuments of the country.The security arrangement for TajMahal had some weird rules, they wouldn't allow you take your tripod with the camera or a charger with the cell phone. 

It was here I witnessed the looting of foreign nationals, the government charges them 10 times the money for entrance fee and the guy who takes care of shoes for them was also doing the same. 

Inside is also well preserved as the outside, tombs of both Shahjahan and Mumtaz Mahal are next to each other (united at death). The semiprecious stones used to decorate the walls inside are still intact and haven't been looted, needless to say photography is not allowed inside the Mahal. Even if they did I am sure I wouldn't have gotten anything nice considering the crowd inside the place. 

One thing I didn't know was the existence of Agra fort, this one is much better than the ones in Jaipur. It was first captured by Babar from the Lodi's (who had captured it from Rajputana and who in turn had captured from others) and has remained under Mughal control from then on. On the outside it is built with redstone and the interiors are partly white marble. It was surprising to know that the fort was the center of Mogul empire, for I always believed Delhi to be the center of Mughal empire. It had a treasury and even housed a mint inside it. The fort was naturally protected by the river yamuna whose waters were used to surround the fort in case of a siege. 

Just like Amer Fort, Agra fort had the section where the king met the ministers and a section where king met with the people and finally the inner section with a garden like the one in the below pic where queens used to live. 

The fort has a beautiful view of Taj Mahal. It was the official abode of most Mughal emperors and was once home for the famous Kohinoor diamond. It supposedly was here that emperor Jehangir declared himself as the king even before Akbar died and this is where Aurangazeb imprisoned his father Shahjahan during his last days. Looking at Taj Mahal from the fort made me think, "Is this what Shahjahan saw during his final days", may be a more clearer view as there wasn't any pollution in the air during those days. Only part of the fort is accessible to visitors as mode of the fort is under renovation.

I didn't like UP as much as I liked Rajasthan for the roads were pretty bad and infrastructure hasn't been developed much. 

Ajmer, Pushkar, Fatehpursikri

We made a day road trip from Jaipur to Ajmer and Pushkar. Ajmer is the home of the beautiful dargah. The place is very unique that people from all faiths and religions visit the place, it has a long history for it has one door built by Ala-ud-din-Khilji and one built by Emperor Jehangir. It was one of the crowded places I have ever visited. I felt the place had an unique energy of its own.

Pushkar boasts of the one and only brahma temple in the world. The temple is quite big and is a temple complex with quite a few smaller temples inside. There is a lake in pushkar but it was pretty dry when we went. The locals claimed lack of rain but my engineering mind said all the canals to fill the lake have been blocked by housing development around the lake.

The next stop was towards Fatehpursikri on the way we stopped at one of the Rajasthan Tourism's hotels and had the best aloo paratha's we had ever had.

Fatehpursikri, as per my remembrance of the history it was part of an effort by emperor Akbar to shift capital from Delhi. There is a beautiful fort in Fatehpur with a mosque in the center. The fort is built with red stone, while the mosque is made from white marble. It appears like a fort from the outside but from the inside it appears as a place to enclose the mosque.

The windows of the mosque are so uniquely designed that from a distance it appears like a sheet of glass than a stone window.

The guide mentioned Akbar's wife Jodha had a small temple in one of the corners of the fort. According to him the below pic is the inverted temple built for Jodha.

The unique feature about the doors in the above pic is that all the doors are of same height but they appear as though the preceding door is smaller than the succeeding door. It is not a photographic gimmick but is built that way.

The fort also has the tunnel through which supposedly Anarkali was smuggled to Lahore and it also houses the graves of lots of near and far relatives of Akbar.

A beautiful place reflecting Mughal architecture but it is so infested with people who claim to be tour guides and photographers that it takes some of the charm away. Supposedly lots of bollywood movies have been shot here.

Niagara - water everywhere

As noted in my previous blog entry we made a trip to Niagara Falls. Here is a travel log of the same.

We flew into Toronto, Canada; the flight was cheaper to Toronto than any place near Niagara Falls inside US. After some delay in the flight at Dallas and some confusion regarding location of rental car office we reached our hotel at 11:30PM on Saturday night.

 

On Sunday we had our breakfast at A&W burger place and that gave the first taste of Canadian way, unlike US the fountain drink and coffee were not unlimited but were rationed. There was a 13% sales tax and the food in general was expensive.

 

After breakfast we started driving to Niagara Falls, thanks to our GPS we took the toll road even though there was no need for it, the weather was pretty damp and it was drizzling. I was hoping the weather would clear away and there will be sunshine but no such luck.

 

Once we reached near the Niagara parkway I was amazed by the number of people, I have never seen so many people at one place barring Time Square NY. There were all kinds of people from all over the world. As it was drizzling one of the first things we did was to buy an umbrella and then we started walking to the falls. The view of the falls was quite amazing, the gorge wasn't too tall but the amount of water flowing was phenomenal The drizzle and the water sprinkling from the falls made our Canon camera malfunction a bit but it got better over time.

 

We first took “Maid of the Mist” tour, we all got dressed in blue rain coats and we climbed into a big ship. The ship took us near the American falls first and then headed towards the horse shoe falls. When we got near the falls the water was no longer a mist but pouring on us from all over the place and needless to say we could have been completely drenched, thanks to the blue uniform just our shoes and trousers were drenched. We couldn't keep our eyes open for more than a few seconds because of splashing water. The sound of the millions of gallons of water falling down 150ft or so is amazing. The experience was wonderful and worth every single penny we paid for it. We were hungry by the end of the trip and ate some crappy food at the restaurant near maid of the mist tour.

 

Next we went to the "Journey Behind the Falls” tour", this tour actually takes us 120ft below and gives us the opportunity to see the falls from the bottom. They have built a tunnel that is 650ft long and has 3 different look outs. The very first look out was the best which let us go outside to open air and watch the falls and we could see the falls from the bottom looking up. The other two are just name sake and not any view there. Again the experience was wonderful, I think we spent nearly half an hour to 45 minutes watching the falls from the bottom and still didn't want to leave the place. I came across some interesting facts while walking through the tunnel, supposedly the water flowing through the horse shoe area every minute is enough to fill a million bath tubs or so. The rate of erosion of the horse shoe was 10ft/year till beginning of 20th century and now due to engineering it has reduced to 1ft for every 10 years.

 

We were wet and soggy by the end of the trip and hence we decided to head back to the hotel and come back in the evening to watch the Niagara illuminated and weather permitted watch the fireworks.

 

We started from the hotel in the night after having dinner at place called Mucho Burrito (excellent Quesadilla), it rained, sorry it poured but we are optimists we drove with the hope that the rain will go away but it pretty much poured till we reached the falls. We lost our way and instead of searching our way looking for the falls we went to Skylon Towers (took us 775ft above the falls). The view of the illuminated Niagara Falls from the top was really gorgeous and to our pleasant surprise at sharp 10:00PM they started the fireworks. The fireworks were a coordinated effort between the Canadian side and American side. It was a short five minute one but was really great.

 

All in all day one was a great success.