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Shanghai is hosting the World Exposition 2010 – a huge show where most countries setup a showcase pavilion that I’d never heard of before

With 200 countries participating this year for the Expo that will run from May to October, 70 million visitors are expected – that’s about 400,000 visitors a day – with 22 million having already visited to-date!

Consequently the queues are long – i.e. between 0.5 hrs (Morocco) to 7 hours (UAE). The Expo covers an area of 5 sq km so its a lot of walking too.

As expected, this is another grand show from the Chinese – the infrastructure is tremendous: easy commute to/from the expo site that’s located about 30 mins by taxi from Shanghai city center, all kinds of amenities inside and pretty good crowd flow.

I reached the gates at 8 AM and was still behind thousands of people. After the 2 hr airport-like security scan, I found I couldn’t enter the Chinese pavilion since I didn’t receive the “First-come-first-serve Reservation” for that Pavilion – which was a disappointment as the Chinese pavilion looked great. (Reservations applied to Taiwan as well)

I then made my way to the next nearest one – Pakistan. The high point of the Paki pavilion was a “projected pseudo-holographic image” on a water-curtain — looked neat. The rest of the pavilion had mostly photos of the country – with a heavy emphasis on the Paki-China friendship – and ending with a kebab restaurant.

The next one was India. A queue of 2.5 hours waited patiently to enter the pavilion whose external design was meant to depict a ‘tree of life’ and had a facade with miniature carvings.

Encircling the stage were small handicraft shops with nothing more than the usual Dilli Haat stuff (ok it may not have been so ‘usual’ for the local crowd).

With no general “flow” to follow, I roamed around and saw crowds moving to the left into a narrow passage. A 15 min wait later in a passage that probably violated most ‘emergency exit’ guidelines, I finally realize it’s the entry to the ‘main’ dome of the pavilion and I take that phew-there’s-still-some-hope-left breath. Inside the dome, the walls are lined up with photographs, artefacts, etc, with the Taj Mahal, Tagore and Lata Mangeshkar among others getting their regular wallspace. There is no description – only a few photos have names – and the crowds keep moving on without really understanding anything.

Quite unfortunately, but not entirely unexpectedly, the pavilion was a HUGE disappointment. For starters, once you enter, there’s a stage in front where performances happen. When I entered, there was a classical instrumental about to end (looked like Amjad Ali Khan’s kids – not sure though) – when it ended, the performer said thanks and quickly pointed out to everyone that his CDs were on sale that they could buy. :-/

Suddenly the lights begin dimming and the crowds start taking seats around a glass structure in the center. Then a AV presentation starts happening – one of those ‘pseudo-hologram projections on tilted glass’. The holograms show 3D line images (not real photos) of various things through Indian history with a narration in Chinese. The show ends in about 7 minutes with the audience not really getting the point of it all.

At the dome exit, I notice the high point for the crowds – a decorated Elephant head that everyone’s queuing up to take pictures with.

After a small Chicken Tikka at an exorbitant price at the Indian restaurant, I make my way out and pity the 2.5 hour queue to the pavilion which only looks longer!

Sadly, an opportunity for us to showcase our progress in the 21st century and to highlight our partnership with China to those it matters most – the Chinese people, falls prey to a (possibly) minimal budget and babu-style-execution. And equally unfortunately, most Indians back home are never going to know how we failed on the world stage given the lack of coverage.

This article does complete justice to our shoddy show at the Expo.

I then visited Morocco – a pavilion looking like a typical white-desert-palace with a beautifully/lavishly done interior. There was a single flow of people in and out – mostly a photo+handicraft display again.

Nepal was next – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to visit it – but the pavilion was setup as an exquisite monastery over quite a big area. There was even a Stupa in the center that you could walk up and around to – and get a good view of the Expo.

During the walk up to the Stupa, you see this humongous dome appearing in the horizon – turns out to be the Cultural center. I think its the “largest” building I’ve ever seen!

I then walked over to the other zone to visit the USA pavilion – which is mostly about 2 AV presentations – but with some neat surprises. After 11 hours at the Expo, I had no time or energy left to go to visit any other countries.

In all, you can spend a whole week trying to cover the Expo. Be prepared for hours of queues and miles of walking. Food etc is easily available.  Another thing I noticed – all day I must have seen about 50 foreigners in the teeming millions of locals – was certainly expecting far more – but it says a lot about the Chinese taking interest in stuff their Govt invests in. (I mean – when did you last go see an Expo at Pragati Maidan, eh?)

In other stuff, most of the days in Shanghai were either rained out or smoggy – with about 2 days of sunshine. See gallery below for some photos – followed by one of the Meridien lighted up at night (like most Shanghai Skyscrapers are).

Later, Shanghai!

Made a trip to Itasca/Chicago in April.. beautiful city (whatever I got to see in half a day).. high point was the vie from the 96th floor of the John Hancock Tower lounge.

The scorching summer heat drives flatlanders like us Delhi-ites out to the hill stations every May/June. Unfortunately but expectedly, the usual spots are at this time way too crowded and congested.  There still are thankfully, some places that haven’t been trampled under scorpios and endeavours and/or littered by colored polybags yet. One of them is Lansdowne, about 230 kms north of Delhi, via Bijnor and Kotdwar.

The town is strictly under army control – hence the good roads, spotless town center and litter bins everywhere. There’s not a lot of touristy places, and there are only a handful of hotels. But there are tall Deodar forests, scenic hills and curving roads, and a couple of divine churches. The town center itself is a small junction with market lanes. The hotel recommendation is Fairydale resort – by far the best and well located (and owned by an XLer!) – there’s another call Blue Pines but it’s way lower than the main town.

Lansdowne

The two Churches

Tarkeshwar Temple – nestled in a Deodar valley – as divine as it gets

Rock formations – One of the many

Boating Lake

Some photos and video from my trip to Varanasi to witness the Total Solar Eclipse on 22 July 2009.

Varanasi turned out to be the best site to watch the eclipse in India as most other places got rained out. There was intermittent cloud cover until before totality but that provided a chance to view the partial sun with naked eyes since the clouds acted as a filter too. Just before totality and later, there was simply no cloud cover.

I was watching from the first floor balcony of a temple, with the Assi Ghat and Ganga right in front of us. Thousands of people had begun crowding the ghat from morning (some fearing the eclipse, some waiting for it), and that panorama added to the overall experience.

I was all prepared with filters and two cameras.. but I got the exposure and zoom wrong.. I should have focused more on getting a ‘regular’ picture of the totality with the Ganga and the Ghat in view, but the couple of mins of totality had me so engrossed that I forgot to take the filters off, resulting in dark totality pictures and missing the first diamond ring.

Nevertheless, nothing compares to a total solar eclipse. For a brief moment, imagine a huge black button with a golden aura in the sky.. the moments of anticipation towards first contact, totality and the diamond rings.. and the (nearly) 2 minutes of eerie darkness during totality. Now I know why there are people that chase eclipses around the world!

While this was pretty much the last total solar eclipse to pass through the main belt of India for the next 100 years or so, there is an Annular solar eclipse coming up on the Jan 15th 2010 which will be viewable from the southern tip of India. The annular eclipse will not see a diamond ring etc but will witness a somewhat brighter totality, since the disc of the moon won’t cover the sun entirely.

Some pictures, including those from Sarnath where I travelled later in the day, are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thearbitcouncil/tags/varanasi/

Here is a video.. the second diamond ring is visible around the 8:20 mark.

Made a trip to Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and Sariska National Park again on the long weekend of Jan 26th ’09. Turned out to be a pretty good trip, and cost effective too.

We didn’t do any bookings prior to the travel, had 3 days and were travelling by car.  We knew we had to be at both parks very early (6 am) to get in early which is the best time to go for, and also avoid missing out the limited gypsies etc available for the rides in the park.

We started off at 3 PM on the Saturday afternoon. Here’s the route we took:

There’s a CCD and Pizza Hut when you are about to enter Mathura, and just before the right you need to take to Dig (or Deeg). This right turn btw is after a junction (there’s a big green signboard on the right road at this X, towards “Govardhan” but that isnt the right right), and after crossing a flyover. It doesn’t show up in googlemaps, so the pink arrow is really a road. (Gmaps just shows a railway line all along – but thankfully we asked directions at the Pizza Hut that saved us from going to Dig in the night). This road was single lane, but newly laid, so while we were driving in the night it was OK. Plus it got us straight to Bharatpur in < 2 hours, which seemed even less since we spent most of the time debating the sum of two sides of a triangle being always greater than the third side axiom.

Bharatpur is an old town but big. You cross most of the city to reach the sanctuary. We arrived at about 8pm and somehow landed up in an area with a lot of hotels that turned out to be close to the sanctuary too.

Just a few hours before, all of Delhi had landed up in the same place too. So there were no rooms. Most of the hotels are lodge-like, with barely any facilities. After some talking we got one hotel owner to put us up in a room in a nearby hostel. There were beds, fresh sheets and a loo with running water, and it was 9pm so it was ok. (Cost – 1050Rs including an additional 3rd bed – you’d never pay that if you had options)

Sun morning we got up at 6 am and reached the sanctuary entrance at abt 6:30. Again most of Delhi had the same bright idea of being there..first. 

The good thing about Bharatpur is that most of the sanctuary is travelled using a single small road.

At the entrance, you need to buy tickets per person, for video cameras and if you want to not go on foot, you can either rent rickshaws (2 per rick) or rent bicycles (of the Atlas type, that only Sunny Deol can lift). You could use your car to enter the sanctuary, but that goes only till about 1 km inside, where you then need to park and ultimately choose foot/rick/bicycle. Also you can rent binoculars, or make sure to carry a good pair.

Tip: It’s the same if you just get a rick from outside – as the ricks are limited, we drove in and luckily found two inside. Don’t park in the general parking – instead park at the Ashoka lodge parking which is to the right after entering, because  when you return the parking will be full and it’ll be a pain to get your car back out.

Every mode of transport beyond this point travels at the same pace. The advantage of a rick is that the rick-driver is able to act as a guide and helps you spot the birds and name them.

Its’ pretty much a Natgeo experience, with all the egrets, herons, storks, kingfishers, treepies, eagles, owls and of course the sambhar and the neelgai by the hundreds. We saw about 35 species that we had never seen before live.

A few kms in, there’s a small resting place – but inadequately stocked so you’re lucky to get tea with milk and absolutely useless loos.

We rode the rick for about 2 hours in, to the point where we got a glimpse of the Siberian crane, and then turned back.

The tickets cost us about Rs. 25 per person, plus car ticket for about 50 or so, and the ricks at 50 bucks an hour with a 100 buck tip each came to 600 bucks.

We then exit the sanctuary and started towards Deeg. This is a very bad road and took us longer than planned. Deeg is supposed to have some good forts to see. There’s some dhabas on the road if you want interesting Rajasthani food.

Sariska has only 2 hotels – a Tiger Den resort owned by the state govt (very good lodge – clean and cheap and good food – abt 1200 Rs a night), and the Sariska Palace, a fancy costlier hotel.  Both are right next to the park. To book Tiger Den you need to go to Bikaner House at Pandara road, Delhi. It’s usually full on holidays. You can call them up at +91 (0) 144 2841342 to ask about vacancies.

We knew it was full, so we decided to stay overnight at Alwar enroute.  Alwar turned out to a great town – good roads, working traffic lights, light traffic and good hotels to stay in. We found a place for about 800 for the night. At Alwar, we managed to see the Siliserh lake and one more thing I forget now.

In Sariska, to properly tour offroad in the park, you need to hire Gypsies. While you can take your own car in, you can’t use it to go off road into the wild. And you can’t risk it to places like Kankwari fort – it’s all rough terrain. Plus in your own car without a guide, there are tough restrictions on getting off your car etc. Now, as the gypsies are limited, it makes sense to reach the counter early. So, from Alwar, we started at 5:45 AM on Monday morning to Sariska. The road turned out to be great – we had tea in the dark at a small dhaba – and with no traffic, made it to Sariska in about 30 mins (even saw Sambhar crossing the road on the way).

There were again people already at the windows, but we did manage to get a gypsy for the full day tour (Rs 2700 – full day means more than 4 hours. Kankwari fort alone takes about 3 hrs in all, so…)

Last time I visited Sariska in the summers – absolutely the worst time with all the heat and dryness. This time, the jungle was cleaner, greener and there was water in all the waterholes.

Again, a lot of neelgai/sambhar, peacocks, monkeys, some birds. The tiger sighting is extremely rare – but apparently just a day before the tiger had appeared on the main road where kids in a school bus got a great sighting. All we saw was a pug mark. :p This time, we did see a croc, langurs and a jackal.

Best of all – we got to see 3 lakes this time – one at the beginning on the left, one next to Kankwari fort, and one on the way out (the biggest). We returned to the first one on the way back to spot a croc basking in the sun. The other two lakes were absolutely stunning – reflecting the blue sheen of the sky – with flocks of birds swooping up and down in the distance – another natgeo moment. Absolutely something you fall in love with.

Lake next to Kankwari fort-

Lake on the way out from Sariska (near Neelam or whatsthatfortsname Fort)

Ancient temple

The temple was the last thing we saw at Sariska, followed by an hour’s journey back to the main gate. We went in for lunch at the Tiger Den, where a buffet is server after noon to about 2 PM. We managed to scrape off whatever food remained there.

Tip: While buying entrance tickets to Sariska, the guy will ask you for more money that the tickets are worth, not pay it back to you, but will adjust the change against the gypsy’s payment (that you’ll pay later) – it’ll be printed on the ticket too. But at the end of the day, you’ll forget that, and still pay the gypsy driver the full amount. So…

And so, after exiting Sariska, we joined the NH-8 and made our way back to Gurgaon. The whole trip came to about Rs 3300 per person, including fuel, hotel, tickets and food.

(Tip: One thing you’ll see absolutely everywhere, even inside the parks, are cell phone towers. So if you have a GPRS enabled phone, download Google maps for mobile application, which shows you your position without having a GPS addon. It’s great. But remember, always ask Pizza Hut for directions )

[Vasant's post on the trip]

Paltan Bazaar, Dehradun

An Evolving restaurant in Dhanaulti. I think I’ll visit it again in a few years!

Dhanaulti is 45 mins from Mussoorie, and incredibly beautiful with lot of virgin territory at this time of the year (May):

Deoprayag – where Alaknanda and Bagirathi meet.. and briefly they had two distinct colors that reluctantly mixed at the merger. Deoprayag is 2 hours from Dehradun but the roads were quite bad this time.

And a ladybird with a macroshot.. came out real well.

Sariska is a huge tiger reserve in Rajasthan, 40 kms off the NH-8, 210 kms from Delhi. Getting there from Delhi by road is very simple – down NH8 towards Jaipur, cross Behror and Kotputli and 40 kms from Kotputli take a sharp left at Shahpur. Follow the main road to cross Viratnagar (after about 18 kms), then Thana Ghazi, and after about 7 more kms you come across a circular in the road – take a right and Tiger Den is to your left.

The reserve used to have tigers but there have been no sightings since about 5 years. There are supposed to be Leopards, Jackals and Hyenas but you probably need to have a longer trip and wait patiently in the right areas.

Enroute to Sariska, after turning left from Shahpur

Options for staying are the Tiger Den resort right at the entrance of the park, and the Sariska Palace. Tiger Den, where we stayed is surprisingly well maintained and comfortable for a Government resort – the food was great too. The rooms were Rs 2350 per double AC room or Rs 1500 per double non-AC (but w/ cooler) room. The rooms are big and spacious – so you can just get extra beds for Rs 575 each. There are 60 rooms and while it was near empty at this time (May) of the year, you can get a room reserved at the Rajasthan Tourism office in Bikaner House, Pandara Road New Delhi. The hotel arranges a jeep for the forest tours too at Rs 815 per trip – but reach early so you have the time to visit the scattered spots of interest, plus hope for a cooperative guide (and not like the 70 year old we got ). You also pay Rs 25 for entrance tickets and Rs 200 if you have a video camera, which the jeep driver will arrange for you.

Tiger Den resort

Boards inside the Tiger Den resort

We first went straight to Kankwari Fort – I think a good 18-20 kms from the entrance, and through some really bad terrain (yea no road at all). But the fort turned out to absolutely worth it.

Just before the fort, the area clears up and acquires a very ‘desert-y’ look – with palm trees and sand plains. There’s also a small village at the foot of the fort – with no electricity and 2 solitary hand pumps. Our driver told us that those people were used to not taking a bath for 6 months at a time, given the shortage of water.

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Two interesting things about the fort’s structure – one, each floor of the fort actually appears to be just a cut in the ground, in the sense that any floor is not the ceiling of the floor below it, but on hard ground – the whole fort being made in a step like fashion. Second, from the top, the various steps seem to be in very accurate alignment. While at first the fort appears to be in the most isolated of places, it becomes obviuos from the top that its located strategically in a central hill that is surrounded by a valley, that is encircled by high mountains – making the fort very impregnable.

On the way there are also some interesting rock formations.

The authorities have created artificial water holes in the forest, where the animals (read Sambhar, Neelgai, Deer, Peacocks) flock. They’ve adjusted so well to humans that they (animals, not authorities) hardly flinch a muscle when a jeep passes.

Don’t expect any tigers now of course, and even a Leopard spotting is probably happening only if you stay on during the sunset or may be early in the morning, and at the right place if you have the permits. We did see a zillion deer and peacocks however. Thankfully the forest, though dry, was denser than Rajaji National Park, and more exciting.

After Kankwari fort and a trip through the forest we reached Pandupol temple. Right before the temple, there are water holes in rocky palmtree lined ‘oases’ – right out of a Jungle book scene and probably a good area to spot a leopard.

You can find some food and drinks at the temple. The real thing however is a 1 km trek from the temple to the Pandupol Gorge – a hole in the hill that according to legend was made by Bheema from Mahabharata. Unfortunately we were too late, and our uncooperative guide refused to give us the 25 mins to walk to that spot. We were also told we’d get bitten by bees at this time of the year. Vehicles aren’t allowed up there since the road isn’t good.

After Pandupol we made it back to the resort, had a good buffet dinner, great lime juice, and sat outside in the lawns during dark.

With 4 people, by road from Delhi, 1 night in the AC room at Tiger Den, cost us about Rs 2000 apiece. Other links to Sariska: link 1, link 2, link 3 (with lot of detail).

Having more time on my hands, getting the right guide, and going at a better time of the year (Sep/Oct?) is what I need to remember to do when I redo this trip (and also Rajaji!)!!!

Rajaji National park (website) has multiple entrances – two are the Mohand entrance just before Dehradun, and one in Hardwar. Despite a 40 km ride through the forest, we really didn’t see anything beyond the deers and peacocks. Never mind the brochures saying that summers are a good time to visit the forest as animal spotting is more likely around the water holes – the forest at this time is mostly dry and dusty and not as dense as you’d want.

You need permission to go in to the forest – from the forest deptt officials. The road trail is cemented and rocky/sandy in most part, but not too bad if you have a good vehicle.

Rajaji National Park map

Rajaji National Park Mohand Entrance

Forest trail

Forest at evening

Hardwar Barrage

Elephant enclosure just before the 2nd entrance to the park

Deer

There’s a peacock if you looked closely…

Shivpuri – Starting point for rafting to Rishikesh – about 17 kms between them by road.

Shivpuri

Cliffjumping enroute the rafting

Arranging to raft is very easy in Rishikesh since there are zillions of operators – earlier in the morning you get more options of rafting course, while the last group usually leaves Rishikesh for Shivpuri around 3 PM. It cost us Rs 450 per person to join a group of 6 other guys, on a 20 odd km stretch from Shivpuri to Rishikesh – going through some of the best rapids on course including Golf course, Roller Coaster, Butterfly, Tee off and 7 others (not in order) but not including Marine Drive which is supposed to be one of the best.