Trip to Bannerghatta national park

Couple of weeks back I have been to Bannerghatta National Park. I went there on a Saturday with two of my friends, Sandeep and Pavan.
The journey began like this. We are staying in koramangala and took 201 BMTC bus and got down at the BTM fly over. From there we were told that buses numbered 345/346/etc would go till the park. But many of them were jam packed. Luckily we found one after a wait of 10 mins. After passing through the IIMB, Apollo Hospitals and Wockhard Hospitals, we were slowly taken into a single lane road.. a typical road connecting various districts in a state to its captial! And then the lush green sideways leading into complete outskirts of Bangalore. The traffic wasn't heavy and we reached the park in around 40 mins.. and a total of 1 hr from our home.

The first impression of the park is that its quite an old one.. Its compound walls have worn out a bit..but my friend who have been there before assured me that its lot better inside. After waiting for 5 mins in the queue, we got a Grand Safari ticket which includes all the safaris(tiger, deer, etc) and entry into the zoo. The grand safari is priced at Rs.120/-. Then we were into the zoo. This is the only entry for all the safaris and the zoo. Knowing that the queue for safari can sometimes be too much, we immediately got into the safari queue. There were two queues. One for the grand safari and another for individual safaris. After a wait of around 15 mins. we were into the safari van. Its a swaraj mazda van completely covered by the iron grill. We got the the seat right in front.. next to the driver.. This proved to be both a boon and a bane.. The good part is that we coordinated with the driver to take some good pictures of the animals.. but the worst part is that.. (sadly this overrules the good part)the front seat is vertically placed to other seats.. and as the road into the safari is a kacha road, our backs and necks started aching..

Coming to the safaris, the first one was the herbivorous safari. here is one of the fine shots we took...

We saw some 2-3 varieties of deers. I expected more number of them.. but anyway we were taken next to place where some bisons were seen.

Then comes the bear safari. It was slight boring as the bears were all sitting dumb on the side of the road..



We next were taken to the tiger safari. Here the security personnal were looking more cautious while opening the gate!! We could see white tigers, the common brown tigers, etc.

Here we could see more and more tigers.. which was good for all of us!

Most of the time in the grand safari was spent here. And we could see many vans in Tiger safari as it is more popular..

My friend kept on taking pictures of tigers in all possible angles and this is the best we got!

Last of all.. we saw a pair of lions.. at some distant resting in the shade..


Towards the end of the safari, we were told about the butterfly park. Surprised a bit to hear that. After giving a tip to the driver, we set off to butterfly park. Believe me, its an awesome place.. You should not miss it..

The entrance to the butterfly park was amazing..
Its a dome house.. where you see lots of saplings and plants inside..

There are butterflies all over. They are of all sizes.. small to big.. and of all possible colors!

It was amazing to watch so many butterflies at once.. It was well planned too.




One of the surprises is that, this butterfly park also has a small artificial water fall which added much to the entire look.
And the other side of the water fall:

And then there was a small museum of butterflies attached to the park. After that we were completely tired and damn hungry. A piece of advice here. The park is not a good place to expect some decent restaurants.. Make arrangements for your food in advance.

After having some snacks, we proceeded to the zoo. It was a well maintained, organized zoo. We watched several snakes, birds, almost dead looking crocodiles...kidding.. elephants, cranes and ducks, monkeys, hyna, zebra, tigers again, leopards, and hippopotamus.

It was a worthy day out for us.
We took the volvo bus on the return.. eating the fried maize corn. I loved the trip.. and all of us were asleep once the AC was turned on...

Want to be Here!

http://dreamroutes.org/western/kodachadri.html

Masinagudi-Ooty Trip (22nd March to 26th March 2006)

This is my first trip to be recorded! So lets enjoy! :)

Masinaguid-Ooty Trip was part of Microsoft Research India Retreat 2006. The trip started on 22nd of March,2006 around 2.30pm from Bangalore. We started off in two majestic buses and roughly 30+ on board! All the 12 interns from BITS were unofficially some how equally distributed in the two buses. So the enthu team is equally distributed! :)

We are now heading to Masinagudi, amidst of Muduamalai forest area.

The trip's fun activities started when we started pouring water thru the windows from one bus to another when the buses stopped at the traffic signals. To my surprise, both the buses were filled with tons of food stuffs like chips, cool drinks, snacks, water bottles, stationary, etc! So what do we do..start eating them!! And forgot to mention, the whole trip was organised by "Fuller Life" and one of the two incharges was in our bus. He, amidst of all protest for organised games, started a puzzle and distributed the questions to us. We formed and played the game. The game was to findout a suitable phrase for each of 30 puzzles. For eg. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZ meant "missing U" and so on.. It was nice. My group, Sriram, Prasad, Anandan, Mythreyee and myself did 29/30 wheras kentaro did all !!!! Eventually he won!

We then had a halt, some 50 km from Mysore. We had some snacks and I had a hot coffee from Coffee Day. I also took some audio casettes and CD's from Aishwarya to play in the bus and when we started moving, the songs also started playing. I then slowly fell asleep and suddenly woke up to see another halt in our journey!
We din't stop much here, taking some stupid snaps of stars, some fighting scenes between Suri and his friend/enemy, Bharathi and some others. Then started heading towards Masinagudi.

It was slowly getting darker..like a slow sleep on a boring day... Some were discussing political matters and others mostly half asleep..In that time of day..we even don't know that we are passing through one of the most important and eventually the first sanctuary in south India, Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary. We suddenly saw a big Elephant on the road side through the window of the bus and started shouting with anxiety! Others who missed it were all searching for it and asking eagerly about the elephant. Further, we also saw a baby elephant and a bison. Then the bus slowly moving uphill and slowly we started to see some boards saying Masinagudi.. thought we would stop soon..but still the bus is going on and on...later came to know that we are actually going deep into the forest where some resorts are located..
Finally, after the bus struggling to go throught the small sandy road - barely sufficient for a bus to pass on, we reached Casa Deep Woods, a resort!


divided into two groups
me in jungle retreat
dogs accompanied...thot why have we come here???
then had some great food....etc