My World of Food and Travel

“You just missed it,” said the photographer, trying hard to suppress his happy grin as he put the cap back on his camera lens. His day was done. For a moment my heart stood still, and then shattered into a thousand pieces. The last fifteen minutes that we spent hurtling through the bumpy jungle roads, chanting prayers, had gone in vain. We had missed seeing the leopard by a whisker. The fact that we were in Kabini Forest Reserve, or rather Nagarahole Wildlife Sanctuary - better known as leopard country, and on a safari by Jungle Lodges, famed for its almost guaranteed leopard sightings, rankled painfully in our mind.  Back at our lodgings with Kabini River Lodge, Ravi, the naturalist accompanying us, shook hands with a sad smile as we alighted from our vehicle.  I took a deep breath, shook off all the negativities, and beamed at him. “It’s alright,” I told him. “The fact that we are in Kabini itself is rewarding enough for us. The leopard doesn’t matter.”...

I am a hoarder of photographs. I don’t click good photos but I like to hold onto them. In the blog, I mostly use my husband’s images – he is the one with the DSLR and the one with photography related knowledge. I am happy with my little point-and-shoot and I am not ashamed to use its zoom facilities to the optimum.  Sometimes, in a vehicle full of bazooka lenses, I am the only one sporting a tiny camera. But from the expression on my face you would think that I have the best equipment amongst all. I was browsing through my folders today, trying to put a closure to my Bandipur experience so that I could start writing on my Kabini trip report, but I found it very disconcerting. I just could not let some of my Bandipur pictures pass away into oblivion, however ordinary they may be.  And so, I decided to put them here as photo stories. (Two of them are the husband’s though, could not stop myself from thieving.) Perhaps one day I shall be reminded of the stories through this...