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Zakopane: The Architectural Gem in the Tatras

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

(Published first in the Deccan Herald, Jul 2015)

We left Krakow under an overcast sky and out on the two-hour undulating highway to Zakopane it drizzled intermittently and fogged up the views. Unless you are looking to ski, climb, glide or snowboard you come to the hills for the views. But the hill weather is unpredictable and there was no way we were going to see the splendor of the Tatra Mountains that looked so alluring in all the guidebooks.

We saw bits of them though, between the pines and the rising fog. Some had broad swathes of white running down their slopes.   These were not the glaciers, Christopher, our guide, reminded us. Tatras have none. These were the ski slopes. Zakopane is Poland’s unofficial winter capital, attracting skiing amateurs and aficionados from across Europe and the world.

We had left Krakow full with the history of the place to a geographically isolated clime further south of Poland. Relatively untouched by the horrors of the Wars that had scarred Krakow and much of Poland, here was a place of quite and harmony.

The Tatra Mountains – the tallest mountains of the Carpathian Range – form a natural boundary between Slovakia and Poland. Mushrooming in their shadows are a host of towns among which the resort town of Zakopane is the biggest and the most popular.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Battling rain and poor visibility we glided smoothly to this Polish town passing rolling hills with hamlets studded into their even slopes. The villages were but a clutch of houses, sitting amidst tidy farms with chicken running amok in the front yards. It was the advent of spring and some farmers were already atop their tractors tilling. A church with a high belfry was the most dominant building. Not surprising in a country with 80 percent Catholics who take their church attendance seriously.

It was an idyllic Central European rural setting one could say. Except this imagery was rudely broken by the occasional strip-club signs in the woods. A surprise, but promising unadulterated adult- fun for weekend revelers spilling out of Krakow.

Zakopane, however, despite the onslaught of tourism and technology, retains its Goral or Highland culture. It is there in their clothes, their music and their food. The attire is however only ceremonially worn. But it was the official dress for the waiters at a restaurant where we stopped for lunch. The restaurant with its cedar-wood ceilings and walls plastered with stuffed animals sought to recreate an otherworldly hunter’s den. A nightmare for any animal lover. But the good food was distracting. As was the local music which had an unmistakable Scottish lilt to it. No wonder then that the Zakopane dance is a group affair bearing uncanny resemblance to the Scottish Ball.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

But the Zakopane culture is synonymous with its architecture inspiring home construction not only in Poland but across Europe.

The houses look complex with an overlay of pattern over pattern. What makes the Zakopane houses look so distinct are the roofs. They are steep, usually over 70 degrees or more and have gables jutting out of them at different levels. These roofs are made of shingles or galvanized iron but in the older houses , the roof and sometime the entire building is hewn of wood.

We stopped by to marvel at the Jasczczurowce Chapel, an epitome of Zakopane architecture built by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the man who popularized the Zakopane style. He built the church in 1904 and it was one of the many buildings that formed the blue print for what came to be known as the Zakopane style.

The best way to take in the beautiful architecture is to walk down Krupowki street- the main Zakopane street. Tidy row of houses line both sides of the near- empty street. There are small stand-alone stalls manned by women who sit inside them, selling condiments mostly made of local cheese.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

We didn’t see any tourists though there were many horse -carriages at the ready. The gabled houses, the stalls, the ubiquitous old churches and the horses with tufts of ankle -hair all lent an old world charm to Zakopane.

Too add to this, a short drive from Zakopane, are the mineral water springs. Our hotel Termy Bukovina had channeled the therapeutic waters into their pools where one could partake of what is believed to be waters with therapeutic and rehabilitation powers.

Perhaps we needed it for the next day when we went snowboarding in the Tatras. Snowboarding is the best option for any fly-by-nigh tourists who cannot ski and have no time to learn how to. You just sit on the machine and press the accelerator. To stop you simple let go the accelerator. But unlike Lapland where I had successfully ridden the snowmobile on the flat snowfields, I had trouble veering the machine in the steep Tatra slopes.

But then as we stopped for a barbeque lunch in a somewhat boggy forest clearing, I realized that what I may have missed in views, I had more than made up in experience.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

How to get there:

There are no direct flights to Krakow from India. Depending on what airlines one takes one has to halt to change planes in one of the several European cities. From Krakow Zakopane is 109 kms by road. It a less than two hour journey on the smooth highway.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Ngorongoro Crater: Africa’s Natural Zoo.

He looks no different than your average pet dog at home. But this guy is a lot lazier and loves to wallow like this all day. At night when the lioness hunt and make a kill he simply bullies them all and walks away with the proverbial lion's share. (sanjay austa austa)

Ngorongoro Lion stretches out, Tanzania. 

 

(The travelogue first appeared in Mumbai Mirror ,  feb 2014)

Standing on the crater’s rim you get a sense  of immense distance. From this height, the crater out below, looks quite small and insignificant. And even when you squint into the binoculars you spot no animals.

There are only   shadows of the cumulus  clouds on the green crater floor making  interesting patchworks, which change if you stare long enough.

We were driving along the crater’s rim on our onwards journey to Serengeti when Musa our driver cum safari guide lets us slip off the Toyota Landcruiser to take in the view of the Ngorongoro crater.

We saw no wildlife  but this stopover fuelled our expectations. The idea of  wild animals  (25000 of them) living in close proximity  in a  natural enclosure was just too surreal.   But Ngorongoro is not just a wildlife attraction in Tanzania. It is also a geological marvel. Two to three million years ago a volcano collapsed on itself forming this deep caldera- one of the biggest in the world.  I wondered if the splendors of the Serengeti would make us  indifferent to Ngorongoro.

The ostrich is hardly on the menu of the predators as it is very fast for most of them. However the cheetah with they are in a group are known to attach and bring down the ostrich. (sanjay austa austa)

The ostriches with the pink flamingos in the soda lake in the background,  Ngorongoro

But they  didn’t.  After a two day Serengeti trip we were eager and expectant at  Ngorongoro.  We had pushed a late- rising  Musa to be the first  at the Ngorongoro check-post for the morning safari.   As he went through the bureaucracy we stood on the rim to view the crater again.  Today it  was an  overcast sky   and I rejoiced that  unlike in Serengeti -where I faced the full brunt of the sun,  I wouldn’t  have to worry about hard shadows in my photos.

A long line of safari jeeps queued up behind us. But when they  signaled us to move, our jeep spluttered,  shook  and spluttered some more. As jeep after jeep of binoculars-and -camera armed tourists whizzed past us,  I wondered if the view from the rim would be  all I’d  take  home.

One of the lessons from my African safari was – choose your safari jeep well.  If the vehicle breaks down, it can put paid to all your plans and joy can quickly turn to irritation.  I was now sharing the rundown Landcruiser   with an aggressive Brazilian man, a shouting  Italian girl , a  cursing  American guy and   one cranky girlfriend.

And we almost never made it to Ngorongoro. They  tried to push -start the jeep on the sloping crater road but to no avail. They shoved us down into the crater alright but the jeep was dead.

The Rhinoceros has a very poor eyesight. It can only make out other mammals from a very close distance. We stood almost two kilometers away but he did not know what to make of us. From that distance the safari vehicle we were in could look like another Rhino to him. (sanjay austa austa)

The rare Black Rhino in  Ngoronogo, Tanzania

As we waited for a replacement vehicle,  I felt hemmed in.  We were stranded near the crater wall, which rose to about 650 meters. Standing here deep below in the caldera with  zebra and wildebeests herds  just a gallop away, we got the real sense of being in the African bush.

From here , unlike at the rim, the crater seemed like a vast endless plain,  much like Serengeti itself. But it’s actually only between 16- 19 kilometers across– with a total area of 264 square kilometers. The crater walls are steep but the ungulates- the wildebeests, the zebras and the buffalo migrate into and from the crater annually.   Many wildebeests,  zebras and elephant  herds make their way out of the crater in the wet season even as the cape buffalos make their way in. The giraffes however are conspicuous by their absence. The steep walls of the crater are too much of an obstacle for them. Besides the crater does not have their favorite acacia trees whose leaves they feed on.

The crater lions, have unfortunately  remained cooped up in the caldera for generations, leading to inbreeding.   There are many reason for this. The main reason is of course man.  The crater’s rim is littered with human habitation. This includes both the burgeoning tourist lodges and the Maasai dwellings.  The crater lions also chase away any marauding lions that might  slip in. With no new blood the lions have poor immunity and become easily susceptible to diseases-including the deadly canine distemper. Their population now stands at less than 65.

Zebras love to cuddle against each other. I saw loads of zebras standing and nuzzling each other like this (sanjay austa austa)

  

 

But when our replacement jeep finally arrived and we were taken on a whistle stop tour of the crater, we were lucky to chance upon three lions in quick succession. One lay sleeping near a safari track, occasionally turning on his back with the cuteness of a pet dog.  We came across two other male lions  in the woodlands near their zebra kill. They had had their fill and were now resting.

We were too immersed with the lions that it took us a while  to notice that the zebra had been pregnant. It had been disemboweled and the tiny dead zebra foal lay by its mother. The other prized sighting here is of the black rhino. Their population is down to a mere 26 . We saw one at a distance and as we closed in on him, he  became skittish.Rhinos have a  very poor eye-sight and Musa told us the rhino had possibly mistaken our jeep for another rhino.

It was our cue to move on.  And  we drive  past Magadi – the soda lake (dotted pink with flamingoes) and past zebra , wildebeest and buffalo heads and climb the escarpment back to the crater’s rim with our perspective completely altered of this  great Natural Zoo.

The elephants i saw in the Ngorongoro crater were either solitary or were in pairs. I did not come across a herd here. Perhaps the crater cannot sustain a big elephant herd. (sanjay austa austa)

 The male elephants live away from the herds, Ngorongoro

 

The Ngorongoro lions are in serious trouble. They have been isolated in the crater from other lions since millennia leading to inbreeding and all the diseases it brings about. (sanjay austa austa)

The Ngorongoro Lion

 

 

A heard of wild buffalo rest but there is always one buffalo standing guard. The buffalo take turns guarding. (sanjay austa austa)

A heard of wild buffalo resting with one of them standing guard, Ngorongoro, Tanzania. 

 

Munich on a Bicycle, Germany

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Cycling in Munich, Germany

This  travelogue  was first published in Deccan Herald, Sep 2013

The last time I rode a bicycle, I was in my 10thgrade and still wobbly. So when our guide suggested a cycling tour of Munich, I was sufficiently alarmed. Why don’t we just get onto one of those HOHO buses, I thought. We could sit comfortably in their open- air comfort and sip on the excellent  Bavarian beers ( yes  its legal to drink in public in Germany).

But Munich prides itself as a cycling city. Cycling  in Munich is not only encouraged but most motorists complain cyclists  are an overly pampered lot. Cyclists  have the right of way here and are given many concessions including being  tolerated on the wrong side of the road on  212 one-way streets.   Cyclists  are sometimes  called the ‘silent killers’ or ‘Rambo Riders’ our guide informed us , for their propensity sometimes to crash  into you from behind.

The city recently anointed itself as  Radlhauptstadt or  the Bicycling Capital. More than 80 percent of Munich residents own a bicycle and there are 17 dedicated Fahrradstrassen or bicycle streets where vehicles are limited to 30kmh and cyclists have priority.  All this is not surprising in a country that is in the vanguard of environmental protection. Cycling is just one of its many initiatives to achieve their ambitious eco-friendly goals.

 

Cycling is the best way the beer loving Bavarians burn all those calories. Also one of the many environment friendly measures of this eco-friendly nation. Munich. Jul 2013. (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Cycling is the way the beer loving Bavarians burn all those calories, Munich

We gathered near the Munich City Center one balmy morning and walked few  streets  to the cycling stand. I tinkered with my cycle for a bit and found it daunting.  The next option was to trundle on a rickshaw.  That would have been humiliating.  Especially since I saw my companions, which included pretty members of the fairer sex, whizz  past me on their cycles.  Its amazing what that can propel you to do.

I hopped on my cycle without a thought and viola I was peddling like a pro.  I crossed my first traffic signal without incident  and rode two blocks and saw   our cycling leader head straight towards heavy pedestrian traffic. This was cause for panic and I began to think of myself as the ‘silent killer’ our guide spoke of , unleashed on Munich’s roads but hoped  I would  be tolerated  in a cycle- friendly metropolis.

But coming from India, I used the little cycle horn liberally and was successful in scattering pedestrians, other cyclists, children, dogs on leashes and feeding pigeons out of my way.

The cycling route was through some of the most scenic parts of the city.  Isar river that cuts across Munich has  a nice wide bank which is a great place to cycle and we cycle a fair portion of it. The day before, we had walked a great length of the river and were witness to a carnival of sorts along the riverside. People of all age-groups were lounging on the river banks. Some reading,  some barbequing, some drinking beer,  others,  tanning or sleeping or in various stages of indolence.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

 

This was surprising as the weekend was still far away.  Our guide informed us that most people come to the Isar  to unwind straight after work. More and more Germans  are choosing not to marry and consequently don’t have children to  fetch from schools, crèches, and elsewhere, leaving  them with  lot of time for themselves.

Cycling down the Isar one realizes that Germans are perhaps more comfortable with nudity than their other western counterparts.  If they want to sit without their clothes on the banks they simply do so without calling themselves nudists or this a nudist beach.

After taking in the views at the Isar, we  cycle a  large swath of the English Garden and here too find the  locals out in hordes.  Munich’s English Garden  is one of the largest urban parks, bigger than New York’s Central Park and is called so because its contouring  is reminiscent of an archetypal English garden of yore.

The man-made river Eisbach runs  across the English Garden and we stop by a bridge where the waters throw up a  standing wave. Surfers queue up here to surf  on the one meter high wave created by the force of the waters gushing under the bridge and meeting still waters. The surfers jiggle on the wave from one end of the bank to the other and can barely keep at it for  30 seconds before the force of the water pushes  them away.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

We cross many historic buildings and despite the  nervousness of my ride,  I could observe  that the city planners had taken  elaborate pains to maintain the architectural congruity, avoiding the modern homogenous steel and glass edifices altogether. The façades of the new buildings including shopping malls wear the old gothic look to blend in seamlessly with  Munich’s past, though on the inside the buildings  could well resemble any glitzy modern mall.

After almost two hours  ride we enter the crowded City  Center again.  In  an effort to catch up with the group   I take liberties with the traffic and witness motorists deferring to my erratic swerves, some stopping while others   waving me on.

Finally at the  the cycling stand I come to a halt  with an exaggerated  flourish. I park my cycle with  both a sense of relief and  exuberance. A city tour on a cycle is a different experience altogether and if its Munich its surely something else.

How to Get here:

Lufthansa Airlines has daily direct flights to Munich from New Delhi and Mumbai.  Bangalore has daily fights to Munich via Frankfurt.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

They lost their childhood to the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots

(Click on photos to go to gallery)

Tripal Singh was 11 years old when his father was killed in Nandnagri. He used to run a small dhaba and Tripal would help him after school. Tripal was in a bus with his cousin and going to his father on 1st Nov. He had a turban then and he remembers being slapped by strangers on the way. But someone also warned him not to travel any further. He was given shelter by a Hindu family. He hid for three days and after the riots found his father's dhaba burnt. They never found his fathers body.

Tripal Singh was 11 years old when his father was killed in Nandnagri. He used to run a small dhaba and Tripal would help him after school. Tripal was in a bus with his cousin and going to his father on 1st Nov. He had a turban then and he remembers being slapped by strangers on the way. But someone also warned him not to travel any further. He was given shelter by a Hindu family. He hid for three days and after the riots found his father’s dhaba burnt. They never found his fathers body.

(Interview with Rediff.com on my photo-essay on the Second Generation  1984 anti-Sikh riot victims, Delhi)

They lost their childhood to the 1984 riots.

In a moving photo documentary, the children of the horrific October 31-November 1-2, 1984 riots narrate personal tales bound together by the common themes of violence, loss and the death of their childhood, reports Sanchari Bhattacharya.

When photographer Sanjay Austa knocked on the doors of the ominously named Widow’s Colony in Delhi, the residents — all survivors of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots — assumed that he had come to do a routine story. But when he asked the women if he could talk to their children instead, they were taken aback. For residents of this colony in Trilokpuri, west Delhi, are used to talking to inquisitive journalists, who often ask them to recount details of the communal carnage that had taken away their beloved husbands.

They are also used to the sudden media attention every year around the time of the anniversary of the riots, or when a senior leader is rapped on charges of inciting them 26 years ago. But their children had so far remained beyond the spotlight of journalistic curiosity.

“Whenever one thinks of the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, we think of the widows of the victims,” says Austa. “But no one pays any attention to the children of these widows. Perhaps because the children don’t appear to be as interesting as victims, or maybe because they were too young at that time to give any gory account of the riots,” he adds.

Rajinder Singh was 10 years old when his father was killed in the 1984 anti-sikh riots in New Delhi. Rajinder was hiding in his neighbour's house with his six siblings. His father was advised to cut of his hair but he refused. He hid in his house in Nandnagri but the mob found and killed him on 1Nov. He was also a ricksha-puller.

Rajinder Singh was 10 years old when his father was killed in the 1984 anti-sikh riots in New Delhi. Rajinder was hiding in his neighbour’s house with his six siblings. His father was advised to cut of his hair but he refused. He hid in his house in Nandnagri but the mob found and killed him on 1Nov. He was also a ricksha-puller.

The vivid images of From Lost Childhood to Uncertain Future, his photo documentary, starkly outline the stories of children “who grew up in the shadow of the riots. These children were newborns or only a few years old or in their mother’s womb when they lost their fathers, brothers and uncles,” says Austa. Now in their mid to late twenties, these youngsters narrate personal tales bound together by the common themes of violence, loss and the death of their childhood.

 

While working on the photo documentary, Austa discovered that the riots had not only left an indelible scar on the minds of the survivors, it had also altered social and financial equations forever for the bereaved families. “The male members were the only breadwinners and the women were housewives. Suddenly the women had to take up clerical posts to make a living and there was no one to look after the children at home,” says Austa. “Some of the widows remarried and their children from the first marriage were often neglected or alienated,” he adds. “All these children had a difficult childhood and it showed. As children, they either dropped out of schools or had to help their mother supplement the family income,” reveals Austa. “Today, more than 60 percent children born in the wake of the 1984 riots are either drug addicts, or unemployed or involved in petty crimes.”

Austa, who visited the colony for an earlier assignment, was struck by the sight of several young men milling around on the streets, apparently ‘doing nothing’. “I made enquiries and found out that these were people who were born during the riots. Most of them were school dropouts and were unemployed. Some of them were clearly on drugs,” he says, explaining how he chanced upon the unusual subject.

Manjeet Singh was three years old when his father was killed by a mob in Bhanjanpura on 1Nov. They descended on their house and dragged his father out. His mother went with him pleading with the mob. They even threw her 10 year old son in a burning pyre. But someone from the mob rescued him. His father was taken away and his body was never found. (sanjay austa austa)

Manjeet Singh was three years old when his father was killed by a mob in Bhanjanpura on 1Nov. They descended on their house and dragged his father out. His mother went with him pleading with the mob. They even threw her 10 year old son in a burning pyre. But someone from the mob rescued him. His father was taken away and his body was never found.

On why he chose to take up photography full time, Austa says, “I think a photograph can convey a story in a stronger way than words. In words, we can exhibit our prejudices, our biases, but a photograph is just what is there. I am not really comfortable with the idea of shooting someone on the street and not having anything to do with him or her later. I like to engage myself in the subjects I shoot. The subjects I choose must have an interesting story to tell which I  try and tell through pictures,” he says.

Austa realised that the process of sharing the tragic stories of his subjects would require extremely sensitive handling and a lot of patience in this case. “During the first few visits, I did not take a single picture,” he says. Instead, he spent that time meeting the families, talking to the youth and forging an understanding with them. “It was much later, after I had won their confidence, that I began shooting,” he says.

Many youth as well as the middle-aged people in the widows colony are unemployed with no permanent job. (sanjay austa austa)

Watching the world go by. Many youth as well as the middle-aged people in the widows colony are unemployed with no permanent job.

The members of the second generation of the riot victims are painfully aware that life has dealt them a raw deal, that they lost their shot at a better life when their fathers lost their lives in the riots. The trauma of either witnessing or hearing stories about the brutal murders of their family members continues to haunt these youngsters. “Some of them, who were four years or older, remember the events vividly. Very few second generation victims could make something of their lives,” says Austa.

His photographs, which capture the moods and moments of the second generation survivors, have garnered a considerable amount of attention after they were posted online. They also received a fair amount of interest from an unexpected quarter. “Hardline sympathisers of the Khalistani movement, who are settled abroad, wanted to appropriate these pictures for their anti-India propaganda. But my intention is only to tell the story as best as I can,” says Austa.

On how the young residents of the Widow’s Colony have reacted to being photographed thus, Austa says, “Some of them were happy (with the photographs), but others wanted to know why I shot them from such crazy angles. They wanted to know why I didn’t take straight shots like they do in studios.”

 


Jordan, Middle-East

I was at the Dead Sea shooting the usual drab stuff you shoot at a beach when these gorgeous Jordanian girls approached me and asked if I could shoot them as well. They said they were of Palestinian origin and wanted to get shot with their homeland in the background. From the Jordanian coast you can see the Palestinian cities clearly and for the Palestinian Jordanian seeing the Palestinian city- lights is always an emotional moment. (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

I was at the Dead Sea shooting the usual drab stuff you shoot at a beach when these gorgeous Jordanian girls approached me and asked if I could shoot them as well. They said they were of Palestinian origin and wanted to get shot with their homeland in the background. From the Jordanian coast you can see the Palestinian cities clearly and for the Palestinian Jordanian seeing the Palestinian city- lights is always an emotional moment.

(click on photos to go to gallery)

Why would Prince William and Kate Middleton  want to spend their honeymoon in Jordan  of all the places in the world? Like everyone else I  had wondered about it when I read the news. But on a  recent trip to this middle-east country I realised why. Jordan is an oasis of peace in an area where suicide-bombings, repressions, reprisal shellings and  political uprisings are a daily norm. Driven primarily by tourism this desert country has managed to keep away from the  daily bloodshed that embroils all its neighbors.  It is the only middle-eastern country that has successfully brokered peace with Israel even though more than 40 percent of its population are Palestinian refugees. We traveled from the Roman city of Jerash in the north through the Biblical sites at Madaba, Mt Nebo and Bethany -the place where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

Horsemen in Petra. The horses were on hire to walk to around Petra. (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Horsemen in Petra. The horses were on hire to ride around Petra.

For a non-believer the Biblical sites can be the most boring part of the trip. No ancient structures grace these ancient  spots. The churches are  no older than 50 years. Even Moses’s memorial at Mt Nebo was just a slab of not very old stone. He was said to have been buried somewhere on this mountain. However Moses has a big Indian connection if some Christian scholars/ archeologists are to be believed. They claim after his work was done Moses lived and died in Kashmir. (Just like Jesus after his crucification) In fact there is a grave of Moses and Jesus in Kashmir to show for it too. A jewish family has been overlooking these graves since generations. The Vatican of-course does not validate these revelations. But I like this story.

Dead sea was a night’s  halt. If you don’t know how to swim, Dead Sea is very good for your confidence. You float effortlessly. However if you know how to swim the extreme salinity of the water (31 percent) will ensure that you cannot do move much. After which we travelled south to the landscaped mountains of Petra and deserts of Wadi Rum and finally ended the journey at the shores of the Red Sea in Aqaba.

camels and bedouins. (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

A bedouin with his camels in Wadi Rum desert.

Petra by night is an otherworldly experience indeed. Its a long walk down the narrow siq or gorge. It was indeed a surreal experience walking in near dark with looming mountains above you in this ancient city . And then suddenly you chance upon this site- thousands of candles illuminating a three-story gateway into the mountain. You are made to sit here and listen to the beduins play some music. This was the treasury of the ancient city of Petra. The Egyptian Pharaoh is said to have hid his treasures here on his pursuit of the Israelites.

Wadi Rum is the archetypical middle-eastern desert with an Arabian Night aura. You have jeep safaris here but of course you can also hire a camel  but the distances are so huge that jeeps fair better.

We terminated our journey at the Red Sea at Aqaba- Jordan’s commercial hub and only sea port.

You will keep bobbing on the surface of the waters at the Dead Sea. The water is very saline so lying on your back is the best way. (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

Everyone wants to be photographed floating in the Dead Sea

 

Beyond the Arctic Circle, Lapland

I missed the spectacle of the Northern Lights but even in the bleak, cloudy weather there were eerie hues towards the evening. (sanjay austa austa)

I missed the spectacle of the Northern Lights but even in the bleak, cloudy weather there were eerie hues towards the evening.

(Click on photos to go to gallery)

( In March 2010 I had an opportunity to fly to Lapland and photograph the life in the Arctic.  While the rest of the world was preparing for a  fine summer the Arctic had not fully woken from its long winter slumber. Following is one of the travelogues I wrote for newspapers . )

Arctic circle is not an imaginary line. At least not in the  Santa Clause village in Lapland, where elaborate lamp-posts tell you exactly what side of the latitude you shiver. This is just as well. Crossing the 66 degree latitude is   indeed a big deal not just for equatorial inhabitants like me  but even for the Northerners who come here to make this big ritual crossing.  And as if to emphasize its significance, once you cross over they  give you a certificate (all for a few Euros of course).

But did I fly across the globe for this hot-selling touristy kitsch?  I had come  for some serious Arctic adventure.  And Lapland,  the Northern Province of Finland,  offers it in truckloads.

So it was quite a relief when Jari our guide backed out his Wagon from the Santa Clause village and drove us on the long straight highway further north.  Lapland has four seasons and from canoeing in summers, to  snowmobiling in winters, it packs enough activities to keep your adrenalin pumping all year.

Marek perhaps made the mistake of tying a female Alaskan Malamite along with two males of the species to the sledge. He tied her behind them but it was not long before they caught her scent. This distracted them and they would sniff the air , the path, and turn around intermittently breaking the ride from time to time. Marek had to shout `go' more than once. But the scent of the female was clearly too overpowering. In the pine and birch forest Mareks `go' echoed back along with the excited yelps of the dogs. But despite the frequent interruptions in which the dogs performed their mating rituals in front of me , I was at least happy that unlike on a Reindeer sledge I could at least see where the dogs were dragging me. (sanjay austa austa)

Marek perhaps made the mistake of tying a female Alaskan Malamite along with two males of the species to the sledge. He tied her behind them but it was not long before they caught her scent. This distracted them and they would sniff the air , the path, and turn around intermittently bringing the ride to a halt.

 

This  was already April. But the winter showed no signs of retreat. It was  longer, colder and more unpredictable than normal.  Usually by April,  the snow begins to  melt. Finland’s over one thousand frozen lakes thaw and crack. The birch and pine forests sprout new leaves and the ground awash with freshly melted snow  begins to  breath life into fauna lying dormant for over six months under several feet of snow.

But this extended winter was perfect for the winter activities Jari had in mind for us. We had already experienced one in Rovaniemi,  Lapland capital , within one hour of our flight’s landing!.  A reindeer sledge ride was a perfect way to throw us headlong into what Lapland represented.

It can be pretty cheesy doing the usual exotic activities a country is famous for.   Riding a reindeer sledge in the Arctic is  like jumping on a bullock cart or a rickshaw ride in India.  But Reindeer Sledging is something much more. The Reindeers are strong reliable and mild  arctic animals who wait for a tug of the reign before they move. But  my reindeer seemed to have a mind of his own. He chose to ignore any tugging on the reign and dragged my sledge of his own volition.   From the sledge all you can see is the narrow hump of the Reindeer and his flat hoofs as they spring back and forth. I wondered how anyone riding the sledge could possibly see where they were going.   But my reindeer had gone down this path many times before and after cutting a large swathe in the pine woods we were soon back at the reindeer farm.

Reindeer Ride is mostly a tourist activity in Lapland but long time ago, along with the Husky sledging it was the only means of transport in these parts.

This man grows potatoes in the summers and with his suspenders and a comely paunch looked every bit the archetypical Arctic farmer i had imagined. Here he rests against the bunkers that the lumberjacks of yore slept on during their night halt. (sanjay austa austa)

This man grows potatoes in the summers and with his suspenders and a comely paunch looked every bit the archetypical Arctic farmer i had imagined. Here he rests against the bunkers that the lumberjacks of yore slept on during their night halt.

 

If Reeinder ride is surreal the husky ride is a fairytale.   The huskies are not really dogs in the true sense. They have a wolf ancestry and similar domination fights, some of which so vicious that they end in a blood bath. However they are surprisingly benign to humans. For that reason they make very poor guard dogs for they  fawn and wag their bushy tails at any stranger.

Marek the Husky keeper would not take us anywhere near the  dogs unless we had heard the last detail about them including their names.   A  husky keeper is  called a  Musher in Finland. It’s a  French word meaning `go’. “When we set off on a  Husky safari we say `go’ to the dogs when we start. That’s how we got the name,’’ explained  Marek.

Marek kept two breeds of huskies. The  Alaskan Malamites and the Greenland Dogs. The former is a much larger and stronger dog but the latter is more wolfish in demeanor.  This was put to good display the moment when half a dozen one year old Greeland puppies began fighting for nothing.  Marek explained they were having domination fights and will continue until status is  established.

Our sledge dogs were the less bad-tempered  Alaskan Malamites. They were overfriendly and clearly raring to take us on a ride.  Marek said the arctic dogs loved long excursions but were put off if they knew the ride was short. They looked huge but weighed only 35 kilos.  When I attempted to pet one of them my hand sank in the furry coat.  The dogs were all hair and  fur and that’s what kept them going in the sub zero Arctic winter.

From the once hard life dependent mainly on hunting the Sami people have come a long way and some of them are so rich that during the herding -season - late September- they employ helicopters to herd in their large Reindeer flocks. (sanjay austa austa)

From the once hard life dependent mainly on hunting the Sami people have come a long way and some of them are so rich that during the herding -season – late September- they employ helicopters to herd in their large Reindeer flocks.

 

Early next morning it was snowing. But snow is never a problem in the Arctic. It just adds to the fun.  So the snowmobile safari would  go on as scheduled. And as I sat astride a sleek snowmobile it occurred to me that I was raring to go even though I had never ridden a bike in my life.  That’s the level of comfort and confidence you get from helpful snowmobile instructors. But the snowmobile is also an incredibly easy machine to operate. After you turn the ignition all you need to know is when to accelerate and when to press the brake.

 Skiing is another popular activity but Finland does not have the great Alpine slopes of central Europe.  It is a relatively flat land but the few slopes it has are great.  The flat swathes of land particularly those bereft of any trees are usually  Finland’s frozen lakes that number in thousands.  They are perfect for testing your patience at ice fishing. But I gave up after standing over a drilled hole with a small fishing rod in  less than a minute. After riding with the reindeers and huskies,  fishing is the last  activity on your mind.

How to get there.

There are a plethora of flights to choose from everyday from both Mumbai and New Delhi. Finnair has daily flights from Delhi and Mumbai  and cuts the shortest route to Helsinki from India.

Rovenami Lapland’s capital, is the gateway to Lapland. You can either fly here from Helsinki or take the train or  railroad car at night.

 

The Reindeers are strong reliable and mild arctic animals who wait for a tug from you on the reign before they move anywhere. But my reindeer seemed to have a mind of his own or perhaps he could sniff out nervous tourists. He choose to ignore any tugging on the reign and dragged my sledge of his own volition and speed. From the sledge all you can see is the narrow hump of the Reindeer and his flat hoofs as they spring back and forth. I wondered how anyone riding the sledge could possibly see where they were going. But my reindeer had gone down this path a lot many times before and after cutting a large swathe in the pine woods we were soon back at the reindeer farm. (sanjay austa austa)

The Reindeers are strong reliable and mild arctic animals who wait for a tug from you on the reign before they move anywhere. But my reindeer seemed to have a mind of his own.

 

Auschwitz: It Horrifies. But it Should Not Surprise Anyone.

Children and women on the “Way to Death”. Auschwitz

 

(Published first in the Deccan Herald, March 2020) 

 

“You will be horrified. If you go there you won’t come back the same”, warned a friend as I boarded the bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Krakow.

Immediately the driver plays ‘Auschwitz’ on the tv, as if to make sure we knew exactly where we were headed.

But the prisoners arrived at this death factory on  trains, herded together like animals in cattle wagons. They came standing, some of them for days, packed together like sardines, without food, water or hope. A bucket in the corner for toilet, if they could reach it at all.

On disembarkment, at Auschwitz II, they encountered an atmosphere of deathly calm and an odor of burning flesh. The SS men, with vicious dogs straining at the leash, summarily examined them and on the basis of their usefulness decided, which ones of them would be exterminated immediately and which ones would be sent to hard labor -to die a slow excruciating death.

This evil is exhibited in all its gory detail in Auschwitz I and its outside it’s  famous gates, the gate  with the wavy metal sign proclaiming the  German phrase, “work will set you free”, that tour buses ejects it’s hoards of tourists.

On peak days Auschwitz gets as many as thirty thousand visitors. The worn off stairs of the buildings  bear  testament to that.  This year, on January  27, Auschwitz commemorated  75th year of its liberation by the Red Army . Survivors most of them in their 90’s, gathered here with dignitaries from over 50 countries to remember and be reminded, as the sign here reminds you; “The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again”.

While you wait to be frisked, rows of three story ochre-brown buildings await grimly to tell a grisly tale. Some of them housed prisoners. Some the SS men. Some were torture- chambers, others death cells.

Auschwitz I is essentially a museum to  Nazi sadism. Among the photographs of prisoners , taken  by  the SS ,  the photographs of twins tell the story of  the Angel of Death , Dr  Josef Mengele and his ghoulish experiments on twins.  If one twin died, which was often the case, the other was killed immediately with an injection to the heart, so Mengele could  do comparative autopsy.

What also leaps out from the exhibits, is a photograph of children, all of them less than five years old, accompanied by women with babies on arms, on the way to the gas chambers blissfully unaware of what awaited them.

A crematoria in the gas-chamber

The grisly story is now well known. Men  and women marked for the gas chambers were separated from each other. They were told to undress for a ‘shower’. But from the shower-heads fitted to the ceiling , oozed Zyklon-B,  suffocating  them to death.

The gas chambers, that snuffed the lives of over 1 million victims here, majority of them Jews, where destroyed  by the fleeing Nazis in 1945,  hoping to erase evidence of their crimes. But there is a reconstructed gas chamber in Auschwich II along with a  crematoria for visitors to see.

The exhibition halls have old leather suitcases of the victims, most of them marked with Jewish names. There is a roomful of John Lennon design glasses. A roomful of shoes, mostly of toddlers. There are combs, shoe-polish, shaving brushes and toys , among them a broken doll.

But it’s the roomful of hair that stays with you. The victims were shorn of their hair and the hair were used to make a rough fabric or to line shoes.

What is absent from the exhibition halls is the gold, the jewellery  and the cash, that the SS men looted off the victims, immediately on their arrival here. “ They did not need them”, was a candid explanation of Oskar Groening, the former SS guard at Auschwitz, who when asked by the judge in the 70 year too-late- -a- trail in 2015, why  he robbed the victims of their possessions.

Roomful of hair, shorn off the victims.

 

This largest extermination camp in the world, was built not just for the killings. It was meant to dehumanize and degrade its victims before it did so.  You see this in the prisoner’s  barracks in  Auschwitz II, which are a about two  kilometers from Auschwitz I . The victims were crammed into bunkers, with no water or toilet. The toilet was practically  an open sewer but you were lucky if you managed to get in. Sometimes you had to use your aluminium bowl.  The  same bowl you used for the scraps they threw at you to eat.

Apart from the obvious lessons from Auschwitz, is the unsettling reality that the perpetrators here were not recognizable  monsters in black and white. They were also loving fathers, brothers, and sons. They were art collectors, appreciated good music and danced at weddings. They went out for movies, cared for their flower garden and cried when their dogs died. They were, in other words, regular folks. Just like you and me.

In that, is maybe a cautionary tale that, despite the religious postulates and despite the Gurus, Godmen,  philosophers and motivational speakers  exhorting us to believe that we are all born good, (and become rotten  along the way,) we may be born with   what Stephen Dawkins called the “selfish gene”.  An evolutionary instinct that had evolutionary rewards when humans lived in isolated bands in the Palaeolithic Period and beyond and had to kill the ‘’other”, for survival.

That this evil gene, still brims beneath the surface, and as evidenced from the Holocaust, or closer home,  from the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in  Delhi, or the  2002 anti-Muslim  riots  in Gujarat, or the recent Delhi Carnage in Feb 2020, can  easily be summoned to play its  mischief.

Auschwitch, horrifies. But it  should not surprise anyone.

 

The Delhi Carnage. Feb 2020.

 

 

Rajinder Singh was 10 years old when his father was killed in the 1984 anti-sikh riots in New Delhi. Rajinder was hiding in his neighbour's house with his six siblings. His father was advised to cut of his hair but he refused. He hid in his house in Nandnagri but the mob found and killed him on 1Nov. He was also a ricksha-puller. (sanjay austa austa)

Delhi Anti-Sikh Riots, 1984. (Rajinder Singh was 10 years old when his father was killed in the 1984 anti-sikh riots in New Delhi)

 

 

 

Oceans and the Great Dying

DCIMAGOPROGOPR7029. (sanjay austa austa)

(Published first in the Sunday Deccan Herald, March 2019)

Text and photos: Sanjay Austa

In the middle of the languid bright blue lagoon in Maldives,  with stingrays and baby sharks swimming under the gangways, the breakfast at the island resort is a heady elaborate affair. “How do you manage to smuggle in bacon in a Muslim majority nation, that takes its religion seriously”, I ask the hostess. She shrugs and says, “We import everything”, and pointing to the smoked salmon on her plate says, “ This has come all the way from Belgium”.

The timber for the wood-villas, spiraling outward into the shallow waters,  a  guide tells us,  later in the day, was shipped from  Malaysia.

Ecologically fragile, tropical tourist sunspots around the world, rely heavily on import while  exporting their ecological troubles elsewhere.

The concerns in these Eldorado’s are epicurean. For the holidaymakers, the ocean is often just an accessory.  Why wet your toes in the sea when your villa comes with an infinity pool?

The oceans have always been a brooding mystery and we are willing to keep them that way. Our obsessions, our aspirations, our dreams are all terrestrial. We are a blue planet (71 percent water) but we are happy to live out our lives on 29 percent of it. In our stories,  the oceans are where we embark on long odysseys to reach finally with relief on some shore. We know more about the surface of the moon (and soon of Mars) than we know about the ocean.  We send out radio telescopes probing for extraterrestrials when aliens inhabit our seas, many waiting to be discovered, many vanishing in an event called the “background extinction”, before we can even discover them.

DCIM@GOPROGOPR0784. (sanjay austa austa)

A free diving  in Watamu, Kenya

But anyone who has had a glimpse of the underwater world is like the proverbial frog out of the well.  The biggest mountains, the deepest gorges, the widest valleys, the steepest canyons, and the broadest spectrum of colours- all lie in the seas. And the most fantastical of all-  the coral reef– the largest living organism  in the world- is a creature of the seas too.

Face down in the middle of Indian Ocean breathing hard though the snorkeling mask, I glimpsed my first coral reef almost a decade ago.  It is incredible that the fantastical structure that stretched out in myriad colors, shapes and sizes, below me,  was all made by the  creatures which are  part-plant, part animal ; the corals.

Elizabeth Kolbert in her book The Sixth Extinction calls the calcifying corals , vast community building projects,  “The way corals change the world-with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations – might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference ; instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them. Thousands -perhaps millions- of species have evolved to rely on coral reefs either directly for protection or food, or indirectly to prey on those species that come seeking protection or food”.

But perhaps no other species is as dependent on them as humans. Coral reefs are a source of income and food for 500 million people worldwide.

Charles Darwin wrote that,” coral reef ranks high among the wonderful objects in the world’.

What is astonishing is that the waters in the tropics, where most of the corals are found, are nutrient-deficient, yet the diversity of species here rivals that of any rainforest. This also puzzled Darwin and this phenomenon is now called the ‘”Darwin’s Paradox”.  Darwin concluded that the answer was recycling. Everything in these waters is recycled. Nothing is wasted in the symbiotic relationship that each organism here has with the other. It is this nutrient deficiency that keeps the tropical waters so transparent and crystal clear.

DCIM@GOPROGOPR4047. (sanjay austa austa)

A fisherman catches a fish with his bare hands, Mauritius

But corals are the canaries in the coal mine for climate change. They would be the first to go and are already on the way out.  And with them as Kolbert writes,  “reefs will be the first major ecosystems in the modern era to become ecologically extinct”.

Estimates point out that we have lost more than 50 percent of corals in the last 30 years. And by 2070 there wont be any corals left at all.

Any species that cannot adapt quickly to the rising temperatures wont survive. Corals are particularly sensitive to any rise in water temperatures and when the temperatures rise, corals as a stress response, expel the algae that lives symbiotically on them. This robs them of their only food source. The corals, devoid of algae turn white before starving to death.

There are wastelands of them across the tropics. In Mauritius,  the boatman drives me almost 20  kilometers along  the southern coastline from  my hotel to see unspoiled corals, where all you had to do,  only a few years ago to see corals was,  walk into the waters  from the hotel beach.

In Bali, overrun by tourists, you have coral graveyards. However in the lesser frequented,  Flores, across the Wallace Line -east of which animals species different to those of Asia are found- corals still thrive. But you still have to dive deeper, where the water is not too warm to trigger coral bleaching and see the corals in their pristine state.

In Watamu, East Africa, the soft white-sand beach was once girdled by a spectacular reef abounding in corals but now its fragmented and the corals are lusterless and without its schools of fish. The dive masters now bring breadcrumbs to entice any fish. The one that shows up is the zebra fish, which dashes at the morsels and disappears quickly again.

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Bleached Corals, Mauritius

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Mauritius. Deep in the Shallows.

 

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The water in the tropics is crystal clear.

Published first in the Deccan Herald,  April 2017.

Nothing prepares you for two astonishing sights at the soft sand Mauritian beaches. The stunning blue-green lagoons and the two-piece bikini clad Indian women, choora draped to their elbows. Both these spectacles, will want you to dive into the waters as fast as your finned feet will allow and stay underwater for as long as the boatman comes to fetch you.

For hiding in the lagoons is a wealth of marine beauty that can temporarily wash off any terrestrial visual assault. But Mauritius, much like other tropical islands, scattered messily in the Indian Ocean, can often satiate all touristy appetites, simply with the show of its beaches. The spread of the white sands, fringed by palm trees on one side and lapped on the other by a calm blue ocean, can bring on a lazy holiday stupor.

However, coming to a tropical Island and not exploring what lies underwater, is like, to use the trite phrase, coming to India and not visiting Khajuraho. Which is not to say, all tourists give in to this inertia. Mauritius, being nearly as far away from Europe as Asia, gets footfalls from all sorts. India’s middleclass throng the island, because it’s neither as exclusive as Maldives nor as promiscuous as Thailand.

DCIMAGOPROGOPR5262. (sanjay austa austa)

Between the reef and the beach is the coral filled lagoon.

Many, especially India’s newly married, having wagered on matrimony, seem to be up for any other foolhardy enterprise, including sky diving, paragliding and also diving. They cheerfully sign the waiver of liability and disclosure form and enter the waters, the Chooras, thankfully, out of sight beneath the wetsuits.

I am at Beachcomber resort’s lagoon in the Island’s North West, barely two hours after touchdown. The water is warm and crystal clear as the tropical waters should be. So much so, that with the snorkeling mask on, I can see anything within 20 meters or more. The clarity comes from the nutrient deficient waters. An irony since the tropical waters supports the most diverse ecosystems after the rainforests. This is known as Darwin’s Paradox, since the phenomenon also perplexed the great man. The answer was recycling. The smorgasbord of organisms teeming in the coral reefs have an efficient recycling system, perhaps the best in nature, where nutrients are passed from one class of organisms to another.

The shallow lagoon is girdled in a protective embrace by the third largest reef in the world. From the sky you see best how the reef protects the Mauritian coast from erosion. The waves crash on the reef far back in the ocean and from the beach to the reef there is a placid coral-filled lagoon. The reef almost entirely encircles this amorphous volcanic island, formed barely 8 millions years ago. From up above, you see the encircling white surf formed by the wave-bashing. Here the deep blue opaqueness of the ocean suddenly gives way to the green-blue transparency of the lagoon, which stretches, languidly towards the coast.

 (sanjay austa austa)

Perhaps from the sky you can see how the reef protects the Mauritian coast from erosion.

If you go on resort organized snorkeling excursions, you will be well within waving distance of your not-a-water-person friend at the beach bar. Though you see more dramatic seascapes and creatures beyond the reef, the shallow lagoon abounds with corals and fish. The most ubiquitous and recognizable is of course the clownfish, better known as Nemo in the public imagination. They sway with the limp gelatinous tentacles of the sea anemone. The sea anemones are genetic oddballs. Growing out from what looks like maroon cloth-sacks, they are both plant and animal. Nemos are fascinating creatures themselves and pioneers of sex-change and matriarchy. They are led by a female and if she dies, a male can lead a group only after he mutates into a female.

It’s also in the shallows that you see bleached corals, victims of both human induced global warming and El Nino. Climate change is not unfortunately a Chinese hoax, as President Trump would have us believe. The corals are infact its first indicators.

The corals cannot bear rising water temperatures and as a defense mechanism expel the algae living on them, turning white before dying. Corals also die because of ocean acidification, which occur when there is too much carbon dioxide in the air. Over fishing and even diving and snorkeling can damage the delicate corals if you don’t wear the right sunscreen. Most sunscreens have the chemical oxybenzone which destroy the corals.

DCIMAGOPROGOPR5237. (sanjay austa austa)

Coral filled lagoon.

Snorkeling has never been this easy with the new masks available now in the market. They snugly wrap around your face and you can breath normally through the nose unlike in the labored way through your mouth with the traditional masks.

Donning this new gear, I could easily outswim the snorkeling guides who had to occasionally come up and pluck off their traditional snorkeling masks to breath normally.

While the western coast  is the favoured place for all underwater aficionados- Flic en Flac offering the best diving and snorkeling spots- its however the south of the island which has some semblance of wilderness.

One early morning a fisherman drove me 10 kilometers along the coast from my hotel in the south to a place untrammeled by tourists and the newlyweds. There with the lagoon all to myself, I wallowed in the waters witnessing a fisherman catch a fish with his bare hands, an octopus-the smartest invertebrate- release his cloud of blue ink before escaping into the warrens of the reef and schools of all manner of skittish fish swimming this way and that almost without a purpose. Just like me.

DCIM@GOPROGOPR4197. (sanjay austa austa)

Teeming with all sorts of fish.

 

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Bleached coral

 

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The waters abound in Boulder forming corals or porities.

 

DCIM@GOPROGOPR4047. (sanjay austa austa)

Fisherman makes a catch with bare hands.

 

Shimla’s Water Crisis and the Lazy Dependency on the Government

The Mall Shimla: pic: The Hindu

(The story first appeared in  Scroll.in, June 2018)

It is ironic that only a few weeks ago the viral post   shared by Shimla residents was not “Stop visiting Shimla”, but a video of a deluge of water sweeping down The Mall Road.

Shimla region has good precipitation and is blessed with  good rainfall even in summers. In May alone, it rained at least on four  different occasions. On May 8th, the rain, accompanied by hail, was  so heavy that the roofs of hundreds of houses leaked and water poured in  sheets through the ceiling.

Yet Shimla always had a water problem.  But more than that it has a laziness problem. Back in the day,  in a boarding school here, on a bad water day, they would suspend the morning PT and march us with toothbrush and towel to brush and wash in the khuds below the school.

There was no water for the  swimming pool so the  solution was to not use it. It remained for the nine  years I was there, as a dank, dark cesspool,  collecting a medley of flotsam over the years.

Today many years later, the solution to Shimla’s water  woes  remain much the same. If there is no water,  Shimlaities   simply learn  to live without it. They have gotten used to taking their bath in rotation, whenever the water comes, which is usually once in three days. They don’t grow plants, partly because the monkeys destroy them but mainly because  where is the water to water them?

Shimla: pic: The Hindu

Last  week, however, the water crisis became so worse that the seven- days- in a -row unwashed residents stormed the newly elected CM’s residence at midnight and raised a stink.

Shimla’s  big folly, however is to assume that the government somehow has  a magic solution to its water woes.  Yes, of course, the Shimla Municipal Corporation could do better – least of all plug the leaks and save  thousands of liters of water which is  wasted each day.  The Corporation could also ensure that the water it supplies is not contaminated- like it was in December 2015, when it supplied a toxic broth of sewage and potable water, killing over 10 people and infecting hundreds of others with jaundice.

Shimla and many other places around the globe are a growing evidence of climate change coupled with an exploding population. A town designed to house only 25 thousand people today houses about 2 lakh people. This population needs at least 44 million liters of  water a day. It is unrealistic to assume that the Shimla Municipal Corporation can provide this huge amount of water even in a year of good snowfall and rain.

Shimla’s residents need to give up their hopeless dependency on the government and begin water conservation practices like harvesting and recycling water.

Shimla roofs are already sloping  and have a drain. All that needs to be done,  is to connect the down pipe to a storage tank. The rainwater can be filtered and pumped back to an overhead tank and can be used for all bathing and washing needs.

 

Drive between Kalka and Shimla is beautiful but it can get very foggy during the monsoons. (sanjay austa austa)

Shimla is blessed with good rains even in Summers

But Shimla residents somehow choose to live without water than harvest it.

A neighbor in Shimla scoffed at the idea of using rainwater when I   offered to give her the surplus from my roof.  The expectations from the government to provide  clean drinking water are  very strong. Even though time and again the corporation has let the residents down, often laying them up in hospitals or killing them with their supply, as it happened in 2015.

Just a month  after the rebuff from the neighbor , a two year old  skeleton of a four year old child (who had been kidnapped two years earlier)  was found from a Corporation Tank.

Rainwater harvesting  will immensely lessen the burden off this overstrained town. It will keep the Corporation from dredging the already drying streams and rivers.  On paper, its  compulsory for all Shimla hotels to harvest rainwater but to avoid the costs of a filtration plant  most hotels fill their rainwater tanks with  Municipal Corporation  water. Very few have any recycling plants.

 

Such beautiful meadows and glades are all across the apple region of Himachal. Here a small cowherd was minding a bunch of village cows. (sanjay austa austa)

Forests and meadows are fast being encroached by apple orchardists

Compounding this are the rich apple orchardists in Shimla district who have  illegally occupied large   swathes of forest land to plant apple trees. (Thankfully they are now   being evicted off it after an High Court order). The apple growers channel huge amounts of  potable water from streams and rivulets for their pesticide sprays. An average orchardist  sprays at least twice a  month. In one year he draws over one  lakh liters of water directly from a water source which is usually a natural  spring or a forest rivulet.

If you apply that average to my  village Ratnari, which has  about 300 households, over 30 million liters of water is utilized  here for the chemical sprays alone.   Multiply that with the thousands of villages dotting Shimla district.

To add to this, new varieties of imported apple plants that become fruit bearing  in a couple of years and are  not labour intensive  are coming into vogue. These plants  have  very shallow roots and require constant irrigation. Wealthy orchardist can easily dig  water-harvesting tanks in sprawling  land to fulfill any irrigation or spraying needs. But they prefer to petition the government to introduce water-lifting schemes, which  further suck the already dying streams dry.

In a drive to make Shimla pretty, it’s a rule for every house to paint their roofs either red or green. Non-compliance is met with a fine and everyone complies.  It takes about 30 thousand rupees to paint a roof. It takes less than  half of that to harvest rainwater.  Shimla needs to get its priorities right.

Heavy rains in May when the roofs of hundreds of houses leaked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sustainability and Luxury go Hand in Hand

 (sanjay austa austa)

(Published first in The Pioneer, March 2018

 

Eco resorts are usually places where you pay to feel guilty. And they are very good at making you feel that way, littering their properties with sanctimonious notes wherever there is the slightest opportunity for you to indulge.

But all the spiel about environment friendliness; ‘ save water’,  ‘save electricity’, and the endless dos and don’ts are in  reality  a broadcast of their own inadequacies.

Any property low on amenities, with little provision for example for water or power backup can now claim to be an eco warrior.

It also seems like a fine strategy to invest in the cheaper low-flow showerheads, or advocate bucket baths, have shabby heating or cooling provisions and save both money and hassle while claiming to be environment friendly.  And should tourists ask for any missing amenity, they  can be made to feel like  irresponsible Neanderthals.

The fact is, all travellers, including environmentalists, communists and those on a budget, go on  holidays to let their hair down. They expect luxury and not lectures on climate change.

Even conservationists, (and I have had quite a handful of them, at both my properties, because I offer them heavy discounts), slip into  tubfulls of water, presumably wine in hand, unmindful of where the 150 liters or so of their tub water will drain.

And indeed no traveller, including them, should really give a damn. Travellers come to have fun and a property eco-friendly or not, has no right to ruin it, in anyway.

But more often than not, a property shifts the responsibility of  eco-friendliness on to the travellers.

So when I decided to built my two properties in Himachal, (Meena Bagh Homes) about two years ago,  I wanted them to be eco friendly  but not at the expense of any luxury whatsoever.

In the little over a year since we opened Meena Bagh Shimla to travellers and over eight months since Meena Bagh Ratnari opened, we have found that  sustainability  is not only compatible with luxury but that it adds  immensely to it.

Take water.  In water plagued Shimla,  the biggest luxury one can give travellers is adequate water. Shimla residents get water supply every alternate day and sometimes after three to four days in summers. However we don’t recommend water conservation.

We harvest rainwater using it for all our water needs including for the shower. The water from the showers and basins (grey water) is then run though our recycling plant and used for flushing toilets and gardening.  We therefore have double recycling in place. The  fact is, the more water you use, the better it is for the recycling systems.  So we not only have high-flow shower-heads but also bath tubs.

We  use the Municipal Corporation’s water only when absolutely necessary. About the quality of water supplied by the  corporation the less said the better.

The only sort of water that we don’t provide, is packaged mineral water. We have RO equipped water dispensers instead, from where guests get unlimited drinking water.

For our hot water we rely on solar geysers which hold more water than conventional electric geysers so while you save an enormous amount of electricity you get  an almost  endless supply of hot water.

Another big luxury one can provide guests especially in Himachal’s biting winter is a warm home. Both our resorts are designed to keep the cold out and prevent heat loss from within. There is a heat loss of over 20 percent from the roof and over 60 percent from the walls.

We have used eco-friendly insulants on the walls and the  roof which minimises the use of any room heaters even in winters.

Additionally we have paneled  the walls,  outer and inner, of both properties  with recycled or ‘waste’ wood, adding to the insulation.

We also have mud- plastered walls  which also  help in providing an ambience of rustic warmth.

After the packaged drinking water, it’s the use-and-throw toiletries that generate the most plastic. This can be replaced with dispensers. Guests get an endless supply of body wash, shampoo, conditioner and body lotion while you need only to refill rather than replace.

Sustainable measures can often add not just to the comforts but also to aesthetics. For example,  I  had no intention or idea about making a  fountain.  But rainwater needs aeration, so we decided to build a waterwheel where the water splashes for a while before cascading back into the rainwater tank, adding character to our small garden.

Similarly the ‘waste’ wood that we sourced from the wood mills in Himachal, lends a traditional feel to our properties. This is the wood that Shimla’s mills discard as waste and is used by Shimla residents in winter for heating. Its simpler and cheaper of course to raise a brick and mortar house. But what is a hill house if its not wooden?

Mystical Underwater in Maldives

(Published first in the Deccan Herald, Feb 2018)

It  is a  myth, usually uncontested,   that  mountaineers and seafarers are given to tall tales. The fact is that we are so far  removed from their experience, that it all   seems such  gobbledegook  Many years ago after my mountain expedition (Kanchenjunga), I discovered that  even the quotidian snippet  from the Base Camp seemed fanciful.

It can get  all the more complicated with oceans. While there are ready mountain vocabularies to mythologize mountains, how do you mythologize a mythology?   Oceans, below their surface , have after all, hardly been part of the human experience. Our obsessions, our aspirations, our pursuits are all firmly on land. Oceans, in stories, across cultures,  have been long odysseys to undertake , to arrive with relief at some shore. We are content to live out our dreams on 29 percent of the planet.

Therefore, when you descend into the deep, hyperbole falls short and you are your own  Columbus and Marco Polo.

Perhaps, a  reason why diving has been compared to  something of a spiritual experience. Could it be a harking back to when we were not even vertebrates and yet to slither out to land from the primeval soup?

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Diving has also been compared with space voyages. The vulnerability, the strangeness of gravity, the star-trek movements and the science fiction landscape are all the same.  A reason why astronauts are dunked into water- tanks to simulate the weightlessness of space to  practice their space walks.

In fact, diving is the best pranayama.  You no longer have to trick your ‘monkey mind’ to focus on the breath.  Breathing is diving’s main event.

And it was just as well, that my fascination for the deep began with Maldives, a country, usually described as,   99 percent water.  A very clumsy snorkeling dip here, many years ago, with a no nonsense female Russian instructor set me on a blitzkrieg of diving and snorkeling across the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Indonesia.

In this second diving trip to Maldives,  I was in the southern atoll , with its relatively healthy corals. And once again, the epicurean delights on offer in the island resort, weighed heavily against any open water escapades.

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The Residence – a new property, had on offer all the hedonisms of an island resort, plus personalized pampering, designed to make the resort your oyster.

Amidst all the mollycoddling, its easy to forget that just beyond the placid lagoon and the infinity pools, just where the light blue of the ocean meets the dark blue, the coral reefs cradling Maldives’ 1190 or so islands, in a protective embrace, are crumbling. And that if global temperatures continue to rise, this Eldorado barely one meters above sea, would all be submerged.

Those diving for years can best gauge the coral’s health from a few years before. The diving group I was with this time, however,  were shark freaks. So we ebbed along on the crystal-clear waters, just off the island reef,  waiting for the ‘incoming’. The incoming tide hauls with it sharks, signaling the time to jump.

But despite plunging in with the ‘incoming’ we had to wait  and it was only after we descending to about 15 meters below water that we saw the sharks. They were   overhead, skimming the surface in schools, ignoring us completely. The sharks in Maldives along with other creatures of the deep are famously non aggressive. It is as easy to swim with them as it is to take  selfies  with half-sedated felines in tourist traps around the world.

But I was there for one boring reason. Corals. And it is getting increasingly boring and depressing what with the corals dying all around the world. In an event called coral bleaching triggered by rising water temperatures,  corals, as a defense mechanism, shed the algae that lives on them, dying in the process. One can see wrecks of dead or half bleached corals at almost all diving spots in the world.

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To see unharmed corals we had to drop deeper, where the water temperature had remained comfortable for the corals to thrive. The fish here was the variety that that came in shoals and like a single organism danced and swerved this way and that without any apparent reason.  It was eerie when the shoals swum below us and we floated, as if on a fish carpet.

Among the reef’s warrens many unfamiliar creatures popped in an out to see the  aliens. The dive instructor pointed to a piece of coral rock repeatedly. On the boat he told me it was a  camouflaged scorpion fish. The ubiquitous clownfish were a bit more wary in these depths. They peeped cautiously from behind the swaying tentacles of the anemones.

But the sight, rather unexpected and one that stayed, is that of the turtle. The  ‘incoming’ hauls them in too and we saw one giant green turtle swim along the reef just as we had used up the air in our tanks.   I had seen green turtles slither painfully to the shore on a hatching site in Oman. The turtle is as nimble and graceful in water as its awkward and cumbersome on land.

The  ‘spiritual’ moment for me occurred, as always, when I popped back  on the surface and began to breath with my nose again.   A spiritual experience is often a relief, a sort of catharsis from a preceding episode of physical or mental stress.

From Buddha to Jesus, mystics have documented their days and years of ordeal before entering a blissful state, which the followers called enlightenment.

Perhaps a  mystical phenomenon of a dive is sometimes overstated. But its only a secret that a minority will know.

How to get here:

Srilankan Airlines has at least one non-stop flight to Maldives’ capital Male per day from many Indian cities, including from Bangaluru. Thiruvananthapuram has three non-stop flights per day while Delhi has one stop flight to Male per day.

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End of Faith: Sam Harris and ‘The Problem with Islam’.

The End of Faith is a clarion call to end all faith based religions but neuroscientist, philosopher and author Sam Harris particularly picks on Islam. He even has a large chapter, helpfully titled, ‘The Problem with Islam’. Harris’s contention is that while adherents of other religions don’t take their faith too seriously, Muslims do. And there lies the rub.

This is somewhat true. It is very rare to come across  atheist Muslims. Rather the term is an oxymoron. It is not uncommon to have a Muslim friend at dinner, refusing to touch the  chicken, because he is not sure if it is halal. Sometimes even the bacon eating, wine drinking ‘westernized’ Muslim, ultimately  believes that Koran is the word of God and unlike the Hindu or the Christian, is not given to questioning this fundamental edict.

On a famous TV show, while interviewing Richard Dawkins, the popular TV journalist Mehdi Hasan admitted he believed Mohammad went to heaven literally on a white winged horse and that he was not joking. Now imagine CNN’s Christiane Amanpore admitting she believed the world was created in six days by God or our own Karan Thapar saying he believed the Earth was supported by a pyramid of turtles.

Harris points out Pew surveys in moderate Muslim Majority countries like Malaysia or Jordan where the majority agreed that the punishment for apostasy should be death. ( Jordan 82 %, Malaysia 62%)

When you see this fundamental difference you can see the point Harris is making. Islam is different. What makes it so different? Harris believes because unlike other religions Koran is one composite book with a central doctrine, much easier to instruct and understand.

Unlike Christianity, where Jesus seems to turn many of the Old Testament dogmas on its head. Which as anyone who has read the Old Testament , will know,  is much more direct call for genocide, mayhem, pillage and murder.

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”. (Matthew 5: 38-39). This is just one example.

Harris believes that Koran attaches a certain finality and infallibility to itself. On a Bill Maher’s show that went viral, Harris called Islam a ‘mother load of bad ideas’ throwing the secularists of the world in a mad tizzy calling Harris a ‘racist’ – an inaccurate term most liberals use for those that criticize Islam. ‘Muslim’ is not a race.

Harris goes further to pigeonhole Islam as being in a league of its own, pointing out that the fundamentalists of all religions are not all the same. The Hindu or the Buddhist extremist is more likely to renounce his household to become a meditating vagrant . And the Jain religious extremist is more likely to starve himself to death than hurt a fly,  he writes. But an Islamic extremist is usually thinking of ways of destroying the infidels.  Harris however, conveniently leaves out the systematic genocide of the Rohingya Muslims by the Buddhist Monks in Myanmar .

Author and Neuroscientist Sam Harris.

Harris thinks that Islamic beliefs should be called out for encouraging violence. But he does not elaborate how that is going to stem Islamic terrorism. He only reiterates his conviction that beliefs lead to action so such beliefs should be questioned or attacked.

There is sort of indication in The End of Faith that the more honest interpretation of the Koran is that it preaches violence. Meaning by extension, that Osama Bin Ladin and the ISIS’s reading of the Koran is far more accurate, than all the majority Muslim moderates. Or as Salman Rushdie once said, that if they are saying they are killing for Islam who are we to say they are not.

One must concede however, no matter how much creative interpretations one may drum up , most of the Koranic verses do seem to be straightforward  instructions to despise, segregate, or simply decimate the infidels. The elaborate annotations that come with almost all translations make it worse, since they seem to corroborate the gist of the Koran’s arguments against the non-believers. For example the Hadith, or the Sayings of the Prophet, which as Harris points out, is nothing but a sort of annotation to the Koran, makes the infidel hating all the more pronounced.

So why do the liberals echo the politicians in claiming that Islam is a religion of peace? Sometimes this is done right after an Islamic terrorist has blown himself up in a school bus. The liberals sometimes blame the writer, the painter, and the cartoonist on provoking the Islamists, just as a girl in India is often blamed for provoking the rapists. Or as Salman Rushdie remarked, how the liberals behave just like the right wing, not tolerating any criticism of religion particularly Islam.

Perhaps the liberals are just being the nice guys at the dinner table, ignoring the obnoxious behavior of their host’s son.  There is a possibility that they haven’t read the Koran. But even if they have, liberals are usually  more interested in perception than truth.

Two of the biggest intellectuals of our time, Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky, one  on  this side of the Altlantic and one on the other, point to the socio-political and economic oppression of Muslims or Muslim nations as the root cause of Islamic fundamentalism.

However Harris questions this logic, siting examples of the 9/11 bombers who were all well educated Muslim men living in privilege. So was Osama Bin Laden and so was  Omar Sheikh; the Daniel Pearl killer and a London School of Economics alumni. So are so many other lone-wolf attackers in the western and the developing world.

But what begs the question and Harris evades it in the book,  is that even if Islam preaches violence what is the wisdom of pointing it out when the majority believes otherwise. Perhaps there is a psychological reason of pushing the,  Islam-is -peaceful theory. Its just like encouraging a bad boy to be good by constantly saying he is good. This positive reinforcement serves to confuse the impressionable  no matter what the fundamentalists preach or what they read in the Koran.

The book also does not explore why Muslims tend to be more religious. Is it plain fear drummed into them from childhood of everlasting hellfire and such, that no amount of education or exposure will erase? Or is it just blind greed for rewards promised in the hereafter (the pull of the 72 virgins for martyrs being the ultimate carrot? ).

In the end after decimating Islam and in some measure Christianity, Harris (predictably? )  roots for Eastern mysticism.

“When great philosopher mystics of the East are weighed against the patriarchs of the Western philosophical and theological traditions, the difference is unmistakable: Buddha, Shankara, Padmasambhava, Nagarjuna, Longchenpa, and countless others down to the present have no equivalents in the West”, he writes indulgently.

Western Philosophy is build on the edifice of Descartes famous, “I think, therefore I am”. A Zen mystic would laugh at that and say ‘’You think? Therefore you are not”. And advise  one to not  be a slave to the ‘monkey mind’ and observe the simple, the  empirical and the quotidian. For example, one’s breath.  A commonplace,  and if one can say,  a scientific way of life.

The book leaves many gaping holes in the understanding of Islam but is a must read, especially for liberals who parrot everything that seems compatible with the narrow liberal narrative of the day and that which reassert their own preconceived certitudes.

Treasures Of The Sea. Watamu, Kenya

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Snorkelling in Watamu, Kenya

(Published first in Outlook Traveller, Oct 2016)

“It is no problem my friend. You just jump”, declares the snorkelling guide gesticulating wildly towards the ocean. We are about a kilometre from the Watamu coastline in Kenya and he has forgotten the life jackets.

I stare at him through the smudgy snorkelling mask, and try to grimace. But my mouth is already twisted awkwardly on the breathing piece, through which I hear myself breathing hard.

I have flippered, cold feet. I am not sure if the rocking of the anchored boat on the choppy waters is making me giddy or his absurd suggestion.

But I had, in an impulsive airport-buy bought the latest GoPro especially for this underwater event and I have to make it look good.

The tiny camera is at the ready, encased in its waterproof housing, stringed tightly around my right hand wrist.

“Are you going or what? he says with something of a rising irritation. I take the proffered ring buoy and descend into the Indian Ocean.

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The zebra fish mill about for any scrap of bread the boatmen throws

Clasping that buoy for dear life with one hand, the other clinching the GoPro, I keep my head down for over an hour until the guide wriggles up with the creatures of the ocean and coerces me back aboard.

It isn’t  as if I had not been surprised before in Africa. Five years ago I had made an impulsive trip to Zanzibar from Tanzania with my fiancé. I had read about the archipelago’s ancient trade routes that ferried slaves and spices but no one told me about the dazzling beaches, the centenarian giant tortoises and other marine life.

Indeed, when you think of Africa you seldom think beyond the ‘Big Five’. At best you picture the marauding wildebeest and zebra herds. Africa as the place of pristine soft sand beaches and turquoise waters that hides incredible marine life, or Africa as a place of our origin with evolutionary links dating back to 17 millions years, (Proconsul fossil housed in Nairobi Museum) is lost in the mad touristy ticking –the- animals-off-the-list game.

In Africa, the spectacular terrestrial creatures overwhelm the senses completely and anything else on the continent is just a bonus.

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The snorkelling guide showed off some diving stunts

Just a few days before in Maasai Mara and Lewa Downs we had had our moments with the Big Five in the less than half hour of the airstrip to camp drive by. But there were no herds. It’s an awful time to visit the savannahs when the herds are gone. It was late December and having grazed up the Mara plains, the wildebeests and zebras had swept across to the wider expanse of the Serengeti.

And as if to make up for the missing zebras, the Watamu reef below me bubbles with zebra fish, named so for their black and white stripes. With every bread morsel the boatman chucks into the ocean- not recommended, since this interferes with the fish’s regular feeding patterns- schools of zebra fish appear from nowhere, gobbling up the morsels greedily.

The Indian Ocean stretching from South East Asia to East Africa is an astonishing cornucopia of marine life. But unfortunately compared to the other oceans there hasn’t be an adequate research on its species, many of whom, scientists believe, still lie undiscovered and many that could be going extinct in the havoc of climate change, vanishing without documentation.

Circulating in labyrinthine coils in that distance are the ocean currents. Therefore any rubbish emanating in the Indian coast can wash up on the beaches of East Africa and visa versa . “We have been doing some research. We haven’t so far got any rubbish from India but we have from Malaysia and Thailand. So its really interesting how the currents work”, says Steve Trott a marine zoologist, Chairman of Watamu Marine Association.

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In the tropics nutrient deficient waters, you can see a long distance off in the ocean

The water is nutrient deficient in the tropics making for great underwater viewing. In Watamu, you can’t just wade into the ocean from the beach and find the corals in the shallows, as you can in the beaches of Indonesia or the Maldives. Here you have to take a boat a kilometre or two into the ocean to hit a reef.

The reef I hover over, mainly has boulder brain corals. These, as the name suggests, are brain-shaped with many tiny rifts, ridges and valleys in which tiny fish seem to play hide and seek. Because of their slow growth and sturdy shape, they are somewhat resistant to coral bleaching compared to the other delicate corals. Coral bleaching is a phenomenon triggered by global warming. The warm waters force the corals to expel the algae living on it. The corals then look white or bleached. The El Nino event in 1998 had bleached almost 70 percent of the corals in East Africa save the boulder brain corals.

The marine wildlife to really look out for in Watamu waters is the green and the hawksbill turtles. But as elsewhere in the world, rampant beach development is encroaching on their traditional egg laying sites on Watamu beaches. Evolution has designed the hatchlings to make for the ocean as fast as possible using the light of the horizon as a beacon. But the bright lights of the resorts confuse making them waddle the wrong way, becoming easy prey to predators.

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In Watamu, they take you a kilometre or so from the coast for diving

A visit to Watamu is incomplete without exploring the Mida Creek. It’s a 32 square kilometres tidal inlet that comprises a mangrove forest. There is a boardwalk that takes you through this forest. Its not the sort of polished primed boardwalk you have at Santosa, Singapore. Here wooden planks are strung together in a rough and ready way, with many of them missing and many rotting. Some of the heavier members in our group worry about crashing the planks as they wobble, flailing at the rope railing.

At the end of the boardwalk is a bird-viewing platform from where one can feast ones eyes on a host of migratory birds fleeing the  European winter. Flamingoes congregate in huge numbers in the vast mudflats fringing the creek. However in the midday sun we see only a smattering of birds. “If you come one hour before high tide you can see a great aggregation of sea birds. They say it’s the largest aggregation of sea birds in east Africa. They number over ten thousand and more. September to April is the best time to come. You just need to time the tide”, says John our guide.

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A visit to Watamu is incomplete without a visit to the Mida Creek

We descend on the mudflats to reach our dugout boats anchored in the shallows. The walk forms a fascinating 20-minute study in marine biology. Every now and then John swoops down to dig out or point an invertebrate. He scoops up a triangular shaped organism. It’s a razor fish and like most organism here, it’s a mollusk with a razor sharp shell.

“They say one square meter of this mudflat has the same energy as a full chocolate bar. I mean there are so many organism living here”, he says patting the loamy earth where we see nothing. But he scoops up the earth from right under and points to some squiggly, squirming organisms, exclaiming excitedly, ”See its so full of life. See”.

The dugout boat is made out of the hollowed out trunk of the Boabab tree, a bottle shaped tree that dots the coast liberally. You sit one behind the other in the narrow hold with the boatman rowing with a long pole behind you. And as our boats move the boatmen sing.

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The dugout ride in the creek is surreal

There may yet be a lot to sing about in this part of Africa which is comparatively serene and unpolluted but it is not exactly safe from the scourge  of overdevelopment. Biggest danger to marine biosphere in Watamu, as elsewhere, apart from climate change, is overfishing. For example the overfishing of the predator fish and mollusks often leads to the proliferation of sea urchins here. The sea urchins then feed on sea grass unchecked. This destabilizes the sea bed, leading to more wave action. With no buffer the waves erode the beaches. And so it goes.

But many marine conservation organisations such as Watamu Marine Association have stepped up to the challenge and from waste management, to recycling to educating the fishermen, they are fighting to protect the unique marine biosphere of East Africa so it becomes more than just an off beat destination for the African traveller.

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The boardwalk at the Mida Creek is just some planks put together in a rough and ready way.

How to get there.

Kenya Airways has two flights daily to Nairobi from Mumbai. From Nairobi one can take the Safarilink aircraft to Malindi. Watamu is over 20 kilometers from Malindi by road.

Where to stay.

Watamu is just like any other beach town. All the crowded markets selling touristy bric-a-brac are inland, while the fancy resorts and hotels face the sea. At the high end is the Madina Palms built with persian architectural elements. It is situated a stone’s throw from Watamu beach. Budget tourists can find the cosy Hossana Guesthouse welcoming, though its on the Watamu main road and a bit of a walk from the beach.

 

 

 

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Fascinating marine life exists on the coast, like this razor fish.

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But unfortunately most travellers have eyes only for these big guys.

Land of Dragons. Flores Islands

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That salvia has a deadly cocktail of over 60 bacteria

Published first in Mail Today (Jul 2016)

For the lay, Eat, Pray, Love tourist, Indonesia is Bali and Bali Indonesia.  For them it is as if the other 17000 or so islands of this archipelago do not exist at all. But Indonesian islands were to British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, what Galapagos islands were to Charles Darwin, both regions helping them formulate their theory of evolution independently.

Interestingly however, in what may be one of the scientific world’s freakish misses, Wallace, who spent eight long years painstakingly studying, chronicling and discovering thousands of species in this part of the world, lived much like the Bali revelers, in complete oblivion of a beast that today is wild Indonesia’s hottest emblem. The komodo dragon, in fact remained shrouded in mystery until as late as 1910, when one of them was killed and its skin sent to scientists in Java.

Today komodo dragons cold-stare you from hoardings, coins, souvenirs, brochures and T-shirts across Indonesia.

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Komodo Island. One of the five islands where the dragons dwell

“Komodos here are not tame. Not like in Zoo”. Our guide is at pains to impress on us the ferociousness of the world’s largest lizard. He is one of the many who narrate to us the unfortunate incident of a Swiss trekker who many years ago, went off the beaten path in the Komodo National Park and was made short work of by the dragons.

“It is lucky if you find the komodos and lucky if you don’t”, the guide concludes epigrammatically.

We take it all in, in the 40 minute speedboat ride to Komodo National Park from Labuan Bajo, the largest city in Flores Island, and a springboard for Komodo National Park excursions.

Komodo National Park includes   four of the five islands where the dragons live. These four islands are brown with clumps of green clinging only about their coast. A perfect habitat for the cold-blooded that like to sun in the dry savannah grass.

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Baby dragons have to keep out of reach of the cannibalistic adults.

The dragons however also sun themselves right on the pier making for a frightful reception committee. However when we alight at Komodo Island, we meet only fork stick wielding rangers at the other end of the long wooden pier. Along with the island’s herbivores; the buffalos, the wild boars, and the deers, humans are also on the dragon’s menu and the forked sticks come in handy to stave them off .

Thankfully on our trek in the savannah , the rangers don’t launch into a maddening dragon chase, a la the tiger safaris in India. Our ranger, like a latter day Wallace stops for every bird sound in the trees and any scampering in the undergrowth. However in the dappled light of the midday sun, the birds are camouflaged and we only get a good glimpse of a brightly coloured jungle fowl.

The ranger then turns his attention to the trees. He tells us in particular about the galand or the palm tree. It’s different from the palm tree whose cultivation has wrecked havoc in large swathes of Indonesian jungles, particularly in Borneo. This one is a wild variant, with no oil, bearing fruits only once in its lifetime. After bearing fruit- perhaps having thus fulfilled its evolutionary duty- it dies. “ There is a soft place inside this tree which is inhabited by geckos and baby dragons”, the ranger informs us. The baby dragons, barely twelve inches at birth, no sooner hatched, scamper up trees like this, to hide from cannibalistic dragons including their mother.

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The dragon habitat is surrounded by beautiful coral reefs

“Komodo no good mama no good papa”, as the ranger puts it. The baby dragons live in their arboreal confines for as long as four years until they become bigger, eventually tipping the scale at about 70 kilos. This is when they lose their ability to climb, keeping in turn other baby dragons out of their reach.

A short walk away we see an array of fork stick armed rangers hard pressed to keep a menacing dragon at bay. He swaggers, head swinging from side to side, tasting the air with its forked tongue. Another dragon – the bigger of the two – lies absolutely stationary. From both their mouth drips saliva, which scientists say has over sixty deadly bacteria.

The aggressive one is the female says one ranger. No it’s an adolescent says another. They debate. But soon concede its hard to tell a male from a female. Males in the dragon world however are pretty much dispensable. The dragons are one of those few miraculous creatures capable of Immaculate Conception. In the absence of a male, the female dragon reproduces asexually.

 (sanjay austa sanjayausta@gmail.)

An adult dragon can weigh upto 70 kilos

What made these dragons so big? The dragons are a perfect example of what biologists call ‘island gigantism’. Cold blooded reptiles if geographically isolated for a long time have a tendency to grow larger, while big mammals have a tendency to grow smaller, a tendency the scientists call ‘island dwarfism’. Before man introduced the buffalo, the wild bore and the deer on these islands, the dragons used to feed on the now extinct pygmy elephant.

Wallace, besides chasing butterflies and insects, was always on a look out for fascinating fauna in Indonesia. He found many but missed the most unusual of them all. How the dragons might have shaped his ideas on evolution is only a matter of speculation. But as strange new discoveries continued to be made in these islands east of Bali (the fossil of yet another human species; the Homo floresiensis was discovered here only in 2003) the last world on these islands has not been said yet.

Male: An Island Unto Itself

 

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Island of Male, Maldives

(Published first in Outlook Traveller, Jul 2016)

 

“There is nothing in Male”, everyone barks, astonished that I would want to forgo –even for a day- the hedonistic delights on offer at the resort, to shuffle about in one of the world’s smallest and densely packed cities.

Indeed, it takes a supreme effort of will to drag oneself out of a Maldivian resort’s infinity pool, and the personal butler’s (thakuru) pamperings to venture anywhere. Even to the sea. Most cottages fan out into the turquoise lagoons and from the sundeck, with the beach way behind you, you feel you are already in the waters. So why bother?

Most tourists to the Maldives see and  care for nothing besides, whisked as they are from the airport in such an efficient hurry by the resort speedboats, as if to prevent them from wandering into the Maldivian capital, Male, just an island hop away. The perception that Maldives archipelago is just a collection of world-class resorts has therefore stayed.

Thankfully my guide Firdaus is enthusiastic and launches into the history of Male no sooner I am ejected off the resort speedboat into this tiny city. The contrast is indeed compelling and you begin to see why no one wants you to spoil the illusion of Maldives as an ultimate utopia.

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From the airport , tourists are quickly whisked away to the comfort of their resorts

Where at the island resorts one is accosted by soft white sands, clear blue waters, tropical trees, coconut with umbrella topped straws and scented damp towels, here in Male, there is just one concrete wall of buildings. Below me, among the fishermen’s detritus, float Coke and water bottles. Male’s architectural element is clearly expediency not aesthetics. The idea seems to be to pack as many buildings as close together as possible on the space-crunched island.

Paucity of space is also why there is a roar of bikes and mopeds on the roads. All solidly stone-paved, the streets are narrow and the two-wheeler is the transport of choice. “If I invite you for a coffee and you see a Maldivian woman and you say, I like her, can you arrange a date with her? The first thing she will ask is do you have a motorbike? The first condition is the bike or else bye bye”, says Firdaus.

But the 1.7-kilometer long and 1 kilometer wide island can as easily be traversed on foot. Every monument, museum and mosque is just an arm’s length away. We first visit the Old Friday Mosque. This once upon a time Buddhist temple was turned into a mosque after the Moroccan scholar Abu al Barakat travelled to Buddhist Maldives and converted the Sultan and with him the country to Islam in the 12th century A.D. The mosque was renovated three times, the last in 1656. It is an important relic of history for all Maldivians. The door and window frames are made from corals. Wooden beams supporting the roof are engraved with Koranic verses but they still hide untold stories of a 1400-year-old Buddhist past. Its a sort of place writer V.S. Naipaul might have wanted to ruminate about in “Among the Believers”, his book about what he termed the “converted people”.

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A once upon a time Buddhist temple . Now the Old Friday Mosque.

It is in Male, the mercantile and political centre of the Maldives where you get a glimpse of any Maldivian culture. You may see the Maldivians at the resort’s sand-floor receptions   deal coolly with the booking queries of bikini clad Europeans but outside the resorts, Maldivians are conservative   and intend to stay that way.

In fact, until the 1980’s the government kept the world of tourists and the world of locals assiduously apart, making the inhabited islands  tourist no- go areas. But tourism is Maldivian economy’s backbone, therefore some concessions were made, like modest guesthouses have now been allowed to spring up not only in Male but in many inhabited islands for the bag-packers and the off- the -beaten -path travellers. However the usual tourist debaucheries of winning, dinning, and bikini sunbathing are alright as long as they are cordoned off from the locals.

Every Maldivian is not only a Muslim but also a Sunni Muslim. It’s a paradise where no other religion can be practiced. There are over 35 mosques in the tiny island of Male itself. We visit many of them including the biggest of them all, the Friday Mosque, which pierces the Male sky with its gold-plated domes.

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Two-wheelers are a transport of choice in Male

There is a Museum, which is a steel and glass building, a gift from China, built in the year 2010. Among other things, it houses old canons, pictures of important political events and a replica of the pen used to sign the Maldives ‘declaration of Independence’ from the British Empire on 26th July 1965.

Male is crowded with a population of 100,000 people. It’s a tiny landmass that rises up barely one meter above the surrounding ocean. But this is a mere statistics for the Indian traveller accustomed to a sea of people in everyday urban India. In comparison Male looks empty. “ People here take care of their skin and don’t come out in the day. They come out only in the evening for shopping”, says Firdaus by way of explanation.

The fish market at the jetty is a place where merchants from all over Maldives congregate to sell vegetables and fish.   I meet Suresh an Indian fisherman from Chennai who says he is not happy with the day’s catch. “The weather is not good. We spent three days out in the ocean and only got this”, he says pointing to a pile of what looked like a good haul to me. There are many Indians like him in Male who earn over 300 dollars a month and visit home once a year.

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The fish market here is always busy

Male also has a beach, which is monopolized completely by children. They are minded by Maldivian women, some of whom wade into the waters after their wards fully clothed.

Not accustomed to tourist footfalls, Male offers little choice for souvenir hunters. But there is almost everything to suit almost everyone’s palate and, if you like Thai food, you are in luck. Male, for some reason, has many restaurants catering to Thai taste buds.

But our guide took us to what he called a local ‘hangout’ joint- the Aioli Restaurant, which seemed more popular with the locals for the shisha than its food. The restaurant did not serve authentic Maldivian food but it was a welcome break from the European-dominated cuisines of the resorts. For example, the smoked salmon served there in the breakfast buffet was imported all the way from Belgium, the hostess on duty told me. We went with the recommendation of a skittish waiter and ordered the Hot and Sour Prawn Soup. The soup was great but very spicy. But thats because you are an Indian, explained Firdaus. “They adjust the chillies according to the country you are from”, he said, slurping comfortably on his soup, shisha smoke from another table whirling about his head.

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Firdaus my guide who loves Bollywood cinema and many Indian actresses.

From the restaurant and just about at any other street corner in Male, huge posters of Mohamad Nasheed, the popular ex-President sentenced to 13 years in jail, and who recently got asylum in Britain, stare down at you. With him the message of  global warming rings ever louder for every Maldivian and the world at large. Should global warming continue at the current pace, there will indeed be nothing in Male in the next two decades. Barely two meters above sea level, Male and all the other 12,00 or so inhabited and uninhabited Maldivian islands will simply go underwater forever.

How to Get Here:

The only direct flights from India are from either Thiruvananthapuram or Kochi. Travellers from any other Indian city will have their flights (on Air India or SpiceJet) routed though one of these cities. SriLankan Airlines and Mihin Lanka offers connections from India via Colombo for about the same price or better and about the same number of flying hours.

Visas :

Visitors don’t need visas to enter the Maldives. Citizens of all nationalities are given a 30-day free visa on arrival, provided their passports are valid for six months, they can show a return ticket and proof of funds or a resort booking.