My World of Food and Travel

“Hampi is a wonderland.” It took me 6 years to visit Hampi and realize this fact, although it was one of the top places people referred to when you asked anyone for interesting weekend getaways from Bangalore. Hampi, till I visited it, represented an image of temples and monuments drowning in a deluge of visitors. The thought of being jostled around while angling for a better view did not appeal to me much. And therefore, I avoided the place. Circa 2015, one fateful rainy day in October, I visited Hampi. Then, I visited it again in sunny December (2015). Read Part 1 here. Irrepressibly, I had fallen head over heels in love with the place. While Hampi is predominantly known for its glorious ruins, and rightly so, I was equally impressed with the sheer variety of avian species this region harboured. Its stark, arid, boulder-strewn landscape hid amidst itself some of the most beautiful and colourful birds that I had come across. Of course, it is difficult to ob...

Indian Sloth Bear The vermillion red sun slid down behind the hills as I wiped the grime off my face, my hair in deep tangles, a happy grin spreading from ear to ear. “You look like the Cheshire Cat,” the husband observed. I was visiting the world heritage site of Hampi and the adjoining Daroji Bear Sanctuary, some 15 kms from Hampi, and I had reason enough to behave like the cat from Alice’s wonderland. The stark landscape of Hampi, with its exquisite ruins and artfully scattered boulders, precariously balancing at implausible angles, had left me breathless with awe. It held me absolutely spellbound and I realized that I would not find solace till I made another visit to this beautiful land. I had visited Hampi the first time in early October 2015, the monsoons having receded somewhat and the sun beginning to show its might. The trip was to be a short one, primarily for the purpose of providing solace to my harried self by gazing soulfully at the ruins of Hamp...

“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.”...