My World of Food and Travel

A road framed in pink... As the wheels of our car scrunched over the dirt track leading towards Old Magazine House, Ganeshgudi, a sense of deja vu engulfed me. I had never been to this part of the world and yet somehow I knew this road, I knew how the entrance gate would look, even the cottages on stilts that we had booked ourselves into… After all, had I not been reading about this place since the past two years, since the time we took up birding? A magical world, they say, where birds came to you. A cacophony of bird songs and colours. Or as Kartik had put it on his blog – a place where you can carry on ‘armchair birding’. It sounded too good to be true, and yet there were photographs to support these eulogies. Pictures that looked as if they were almost photoshopped. How could birds look like they had been posing for the photographers, perched on those beautiful mossy boughs?  “Let’s find out, shall we?” the husband said, parking our car in the shade of tall trees. ...

I have spent most of my life in Guwahati, and yet I never ventured towards Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary. I think we still had that nobody-can-come-close-to-Manas hangover and could not imagine any wildlife flourishing near such a busy city as Guwahati. “Pobitora is for city slickers who have never seen real wildlife,” we would scoff and offer Pobitora as a sight-seeing option to anyone who asked what was there to see in Guwahati. And so it continued, our feigned attitude towards Pobitora, till the time we became city slickers ourselves, a breed we had looked upon with contempt. You see, what goes around comes around. This time, when I went home to Guwahati in December 2013, I gulped down all my previous proclamations and made way for Pobitora with my parents on a cold, misty, pre-dawn morning. The changes in the city brought over a ponderous mood but thankfully, the gloomy clouds of my mind lifted with the appearance of the sun. A sumptuous hot breakfast in a resort just at the ent...