Bank myna (Acridotheres ginginianus) are a common sight in the streets and bazaars of small towns in the north of India as well as around cultivated fields. It is easily differentiated from the Common myna (A. tristis) by its dustier colour, and the reddish-orange wattle behind its eyes. It’s a bird of the south Asian plains, from Pakistan to Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and all of northern India. Its range is slowly expanding southwards, with reports of its sighting in Andhra Pradesh and further into peninsular India. This omnivore gets its name from the fact that its preferred nesting sites are in the banks of rivers, where it excavates tunnels reaching deep into the mud.
This is an invitation to share your post about birds, their photos, or their behaviour. If you post about birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to have a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. Do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post, and remember to visit other people’s posts. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
“Java? Funny. Everyone we know goes to Bali,” The Family said when I suggested a trip to Java for a very special birthday. My heart sank. Was it back to the drawing board for me? But she followed up with “It sounds exciting.” Java, Sumatra and Borneo have been merely evocative names on maps for me, not quite connected in my mind to the chapters of heroic anti-colonial struggles that had barely transitioned from newpapers to history books when I was in school. So now I was left to plan our first trip to Indonesia.
Our main destination will be the ruins of the ancient Buddhist temple complex of Borobodur and the nearby ruins of the Prambanan complex of Hindu temples. Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites and stand close to the city of Yogyakarta. The city was the capital of the Mataram kingdom, which ruled from the 8th century CE to the 10th, and built these two temple complexes. Successive kingdoms and Sultanates arose, until the Dutch invasion in the 18th century. The Keraton, the palace complex of the Sultans was built in 1755 and is something we want to see. Also on our list is the Sangiran Early Man site, the archaeological dig where the remains of the Java man was first found.
Also in Yogyakarta is a monument to a nearly forgotten chapter in anti-colonial history. After Sukarno declared independence on 17 August 1945, the Dutch tried to take back Indonesia with the help of the British army. During this period, newly independent India sent help to the nationalists through an airline run by the pilot and Indian freedom fighter Biju Patnaik. He personally flew a plane that rescued the vice president Muhammad Hatta and prime minister Sutan Sjahrir from the Dutch. A later flight containing three tons of humanitarian relief was shot down near Yogyakarta, killing everybody on board except one. There’s a monument to this plane dating from 1948, where the tail section of the Dakota with the call number VT-CLA can be seen. The day is commemorated by the Indonesian air force as Service Day.I would like to visit the monument in memory of the times when India supported freedom across the world.
We plan to land in Jakarta, the world’s most populous city with an estimated population of over 41 million. What I read about Jakarta makes it sound a lot like Mumbai. There is little to see, but it is full of life, if you can avoid traffic jams. We will probably spend some time here walking around the old colonial areas in Kota Tua, the Chinatown in Glodok, see the national monument, the Istiklal mosque, spend some time in the very highly rated National Museum. There’s a whole lot of food recommended by travel blogger Harinda Bama, who also recommends some of the thriving contemporary art spaces. There’ll be enough to do in Jakarta.
Java is a volcanic island with nearly 50 active volcanos, and even on the first of what might be many visits we don’t want to miss out on all. So we thought we would wrap volcano visit, anti-colonial history and contemporary art into a pastel called Bandung. The capital of West Java province hosted a conference of newly independent African and Asian nations in 1955 which changed the world, and still continues to affect it. We’ll visit the conference center and museum certainly. Bandung holds a variety of galleries and art spaces which sound like the kind of thing you could take a week over. We can only skim the surface. A short day trip out of the town would take us to Kawah Putih, an acidic sulphurous crater lake belonging to the volcano of Mount Patuha.
One of the reasons we travel is to watch birds, insects and other wildlife. I think we could spot a few lifers in Jakarta, Bandung, Kawah Putih and Yogyakarta. Still, it would be nice to take a full day for birding in a hotspot. I understand that there are a few spots one can reach from Jakarta where you could get a productive day’s birding. This’ll take some planning. And that reminds me, I’ll have to look for books on Java and Indonesia by authors other than the famous one by Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the two people who independently discovered the fact of evolution.
Less than two months ago, and it now seems to be another world. By all rights this photo of Narvik should look bleak. It was overcast and windy, the temperature was what you expect of the frigid zones of the world. But we were excited by the very thought of being in such a faraway place. The white houses, the snow piled on the ground, even the bleak light were exciting for us. The pandemic disrupted our travels, and it was three years before I took out my passport again. The cost of a flight between India and Europe had approximately doubled in those few years. Another three years on we were beginning to hit our stride again.
But now, I’m holding tickets through Dubai bought in an earlier epoch of history. When I look at alternatives, I find that the prices are close to doubling again. It is a pandemic level change in travels. Travel to Africa and Asia is still possible, so perhaps there are parts of the world which are not cut off. But in India restaurants are failing at pandemic-era rates as cooking gas goes out of the market. I can’t imagine that other places in Asia and Africa will fare much better. Is it time to hunker down again? I should start looking for recipes which require quick cooking.
A long and hectic month draws to an end. I still have a flight to go, and a long drive after that before I reach home. But my favourite airports are those which, like Hong Kong, give you a nice restful place to wind down before you enter the twilight zone of life inside an aluminium tube. I have my favourite pub in this terminal, and my favourite table happened to be available. I could have my beer, call home, and then just stretch out to take in the sight of the hills that surround the airport. The scene before me had a spot of warmth and a spread of bleak evening light. A perfect capture of the atmosphere of this little restaurant.
Maybe you have noticed my relative lack of activity on blogs. That’s because I’m now on a long road trip through Bhutan. We enter the country in the east through Samdrup Jonkhar, and exit on the west through the border town of Phuentsholing. Bhutan is a series of valleys connected by passes. Over the days we will travel from valley to valley, over these high passes. All our nights will be spent in valleys, except for the first night.
Our days will be long, and it could be that our network access will not be the best. So activity may remain low for a while (I will, of course, catch up with your comments and posts after I’m back). Our last road trip through Bhutan was almost two decades ago, during the time of transition to a constitutional monarchy. I expect that things have changed a lot since then. I’m looking forward to the trip, to the new stories and connections from this beautiful land.
Exactly three thousand six hundred and forty five days ago I wrote my first post on this blog. “Can we go to Corbett? No, that requires a longer vacation. What about Munnar? No, same reason. Badami? Hotels don’t look too inviting. North Bengal? Too short a trip. Assam? No.” I wrote about planning a trip to Valparai. In ten years that post has been seen seven times. Not a single person commented or liked that post. Undeterred, I continued to post, and sporadically people commented. Four days later I posted a couple of photos. I got three likes on that post!
When I started this blog I wanted to preserve the details of preparing for a trip. But four days later, with that first photo that I posted I found a new purpose. Every time I made a trip on work I took a few hours to see something outside of work in the city I visited. I climbed a rock (photo above) and found a little mosque near a data center I was setting up. If I hadn’t started this blog I would never have found it. It also gave me an early clue about what I could possibly spend my time doing when I stopped working.
I started reporting on trips, writing down the stories around the photos I took. Very few people read my posts. On my first trip to China I posted photos every night. I shared them with friends and family, and they seemed to like it. I got a few responses from helpful strangers with tips on negotiating China. In those first months I had about five views of my posts per day. By the end of that year the number of views had doubled. It was four years before I averaged a hundred visits a day. But that was because I had posted about once a day. When you realize that a corpus of over a thousand posts got that many visits, you realize that an egret fishing in a flood had better chances of someone stopping to watch it.
What catches the fancy of a vanishingly small fraction of the internet is hard to predict. Why would a post on the red-tailed skinks of India be viewed about five thousand times? That’s almost two views per day, every day! And then there’s a person from Timor-Leste who has clicked through to something I wrote. It made me look up the country, and now I want to go there. Then there is Svalbard, not exactly a country, but enough of one that it shares an internet domain with Jan Mayen Islands. No one from that domain has ever come close to reading what I have to write. I not only found two nearly-countries which I didn’t know about, and I now know what kind of a visa I need to visit them.
Himalayan white oak forest in Tirthan valley
Every experience changes your life a little. Some are so small that you don’t notice it. Others start a small cascade of changes that become a large change that you only recognize much later. You plant a seed, and a hundred years later the whole hillside is forested (spare a thought also about seeds that never sprouted). Starting a blog about my travels was this kind of a slow change. Not only has it changed the way I travel and share stories, but in a small way I have also connected with people across the world, and learnt from them.
Grateful? It is hard to be grateful to the quantum fluctuations that created the universe, or the interplay of gravity and nuclear physics that created the chemical elements which we are made of. It is hard to be grateful for the chance that we are, for a while. But it is easy to be grateful for the grace and kindness of strangers who ease our daily way. We took a boat through the harbour on a stormy monsoon day to reach the island of Elephanta. A hundred birdwatchers spontaneously queued up to watch a group of brown noddys which sat on the railing of the harbourmaster’s cabin. Each person took a few photos and gave space to the next. No jostling, no anger.
We have found the same kindness on trips to watch flora and fauna across the country. Traveling in a small group of strangers can be stressful. It sometimes is, but most times people are gracious and accomodating: adapting spontaneously to the peculiarities of others. For example, people are on time usually, but are forgiving of those who aren’t. A famous signboard in an Irani cafe in Mumbai once exhorted: “Do not discuss horse racing or politics.” This is the policy we all adopt. Sometimes, specially after a hard trip, we stay in touch, meet for dinner, or take more trips together.
Kazakhstan was a beautiful experience in many ways, but the pub in Almaty where we arrived on a quiz night settled it for us. We found a place at a table, and were treated just like anyone else: left alone by and large, but able to strike up conversations when you want. This, in spite of the obvious fact that we were foreigners who spoke no Kazakh or Russian. Travel is when you notice how nice people are by and large, and how unusual xenophobia is.
We will never meet again many of the wonderful people we run into, but in the brief time we spend with them we grow to like them. The driver of a pickup truck who agreed to be our taxi service in the Shimla hills, and a local guide who took us on walks across the hills were such people. Anywhere in the world, some of the people who deal with tourists are transactional, but a surprisingly large number are friendly and open. You know, and they know, that you’ll only see each other for a few days, but they’ll do unexpected and thoughtful things for you. That is why I am grateful to other people, not to the forces of nature.
In this age of mass tourism, everything that you photograph will have been photographed a million times before, and will be photographed again several million times. There is no way that a straightforward view of the Zhan Garden in Nanjing, one of the five classical gardens of China, will be different. But that’s the lovely thing about tourists’ photos: they don’t have to be different. They are only meant to remind you of how beautiful the world is, and how lucky you have been in your time in it.
2011: Tour Eiffel
During the two decades I spent travelling to Paris in springs and summers I took hundreds of photos of each of the famous tourist spots in the city. One summer , late in the evening, I decided to walk out into the little lanes around the Seine and approached the Eiffel tower from a different angle. I was very happy with this photograph: it is slightly different from the others, and reminds me of that relaxed summer when The Family and I hosted many friends who passed through the city.
Mandu, near Indore, is not known as well as it should be. The capital of a small medieval principality which fell to the Mughals, it had architectural ambitions well beyond what such a small state usually managed to achieve. Above you see a misty view of the tomb of Hoshang Shah. This was a structure which was an exemplar of what could be done in those days, and was copied several times. The most famous copy surpassed the original by a hair, and is called the Taj Mahal.
On a cold and windy evening The Family and I walked around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz: stopping to take in the sights and tastes of the place. It is very far removed from the atmosphere of the Weimer that Döblin captured. But with the Soviet-era TV tower looming over everything, you can get interesting photos.
One of the most memorable walks in our lives took the two of us to a place on the border of India and Nepal from which we could see four of the world’s five highest mountains. On one side was Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, that’s the view you see here. On the other side was Kanchenjunga. The clear skies, the sun warming us as we stood on a ridge high above the valleys that winter, the exhilaration of the day’s walk: these are the memories that this photo brings back. There was also the little matter of our phone switching between Indian and Nepali carriers several times that day: a circumstance which led to a huge phone bill, and took us months to sort out.
The Nezu shrine in Japan is not as famous as it should be. It is not only the azalea blooms which fill its gardens the week after the cherries, but also the lovely walk through the orange torii. There are also the fox guardians which dot the place, and its connection to many Meiji era writers and artists which make it a place worth a visit.
The Little Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, more properly known as the Church of Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus, and the Cathedral of Porto are two structures which are often given a miss by tourists. We had enough time in the two cities to explore them in detail, so we visited both. They were definitely worth the visit. But even more than the beautiful architecture (the windows cut into the dome in the Little Hagia Sophia, and the azulejos of the cathedral) what I remember now are the peaceful atmosphere: a complete lack of other tourists in cities filled with them. Paradoxically, that’s what you want to do as a tourist: break free of others like you.
My flight from Mumbai to the US flew east over India. I was surprised that it didn’t fly over the pole. I’d even been trying to figure out whether I would be night when we were sufficiently far north to see aurorae around me. Instead we flew east, south of the Himalayas, then veered north to pass over China and Japan before crossing the Pacific to land in San Francisco. The route was horribly bumpy. Later I tried to ask a climate expert if this massive amount of air turbulence could be caused by climate change and hot seas. I had my answer in a couple of days when a Singapore Airlines flight over a slightly more southern route fell 1800 meters in five seconds due to turbulence. I was not looking forward to the sixteen hours long return flight.
As it happened, we travelled north from San Francisco. Within a short while we were over Canada. The flight was rock steady in this cooler air. Eventually I took my drink and stood at a port near the rear galley of the Dreamliner. Canada passed below me, mostly covered in clouds, but intermittently with large gaps which allowed a glimpse of the landscape. There were extensive plains dotted with frozen sheets of ice, metling at the edges. We were flying over the Northern Territories, then the Tuktut Nogait National Park, home of gyr falcons, arctic wolves, and bluenose caribou. Now that would be a place worth visiting! It was still early in the year, and the northwest passage was still blocked.
Much later, after I had a nap, I went back to the port by the galley. We were now flying south over Greenland. We would be flying in daylight until the plane landed. As the clouds cleared I could see massive ranges of snow-covered mountains visible in the slanting light of a northern summer. The flight had been very smooth; the seas here were still too cold to generate any atmospheric turbulence. From this height the landscape seemed to crawl past at a terribly slow pace. It is only on flights like this that you realize how vast the planet is, and how small we are. Eventually we came to a coast, where glaciers were dropping into the sea: the nursery of icebergs. Beyond that was pack ice. Then warmer climates. Soon we were flying over Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and the west coast of India. I could see the Asian monsoon clouds begin to form over the sea. And then we were down.
Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare. (Every body must persist in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight direction, except in so far as it is forced to change that state by impressed forces.)
Isaac Newton
Mahaparinirvana. It’s hard to imagine a state of peace deeper than the one that is achieved when a person who has attained nirvana during his lifetime passes away. That is the theme of the sleeping Buddhas that you see so often in Buddhist iconography. The statue that you see in the photo is in Bangkok’s Wat Pho, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. It was a very hot day when I arrived here and sat in the shade to cool off. So I was in a state of peace, albeit lesser, when I walked around the statue.
Another place, another golden day. An afternoon spent taking photos of birds in the shallows of Odisha’s Chilika lake, ended with a glorious sunset. As the light failed I was forced to stop taking photos of birds. I was quite satisfied, and as much at peace with the day as a birder can be. It was time to catch the light through the reeds. Does that photo say “peace” to you?
I spent a month in Frascati one summer a few years ago. An old friend and a colleague was also there with his partner. A weekend before the solstice there was a program of music in the open at every square in the town. We spent the evening at an enoteca in a small square. Like many of these extablishments, you could buy jugs of fresh wine and sit at a table outside. We’d brought our own olives and bread, cold cuts and olive oil and salad. We sat there with the food and wine and listened to the music as we talked. I only had an old phone to take photos with; it didn’t do well with low light. Six months later I heard that my friend had tested positive for cancer. I met him once again after that, but this is how I remember the couple, by that last peaceful summer.
So many of my most peaceful memories are near lakes and by the sea! This is a photo I took on a rainy day on Lake Inle in Myanmar. Some villages on the lake (they build their houses on stilts planted in the mud) farm lotus, and use the fiber from the stems to make cloth. I bought a shirt made from this fabric, and found it was very comfortable after a couple of washes. In that moment I went wild photographing water drops at rest on the leaves with my trusty old Panasonic Lumix. You can see the reflection of the gray sky in the large drop in the photo above. The people on the lake live a hard life, but, at that time at least, their lives seemed peaceful.
Don't hold your breath 
