My Bangalore Adventure, part 19: Bannerghatta

After the bus trip, arrival at Bannerghatta seemed a little abrupt, most likely because I had the mistaken idea the bus stop was associated to a hotel when really it stopped at a parking lot outside the formal zoo with a cafe pavilion across the way in the other direction. The lodge van was already there to pick me up.

It was a about a 15 minute drive winding uphill into the forest. At two points, we glimpsed native deer browsing near the road or dashing into the brush. Then we passed a large lagoon complete with a night heron fishing for dinner and pulled into the lodge compound.

After a gracious welcome and check-in, I had a little less than an hour to settle in before assembling with the other weekend guests for a whirlwind “safari” minibus tour of the large animal exhibits including a butterfly park.

When I say "whirlwind" I really mean it. We took a drive that could have taken most of the day if you stopped at every scenic overlook and animal enclosure for twenty minutes of photography and/or bird-spotting. But, it only lasted about two hours. The driver only slowed down when the featured large animals were in easy sight; and since you were always aware that each area was carefully enclosed by moats and fencing, it was just like going to a zoo.

Until we got to the butterfly park. Our short-changed time was paid back with 20 minutes at the butterfly park. Of course, since butterflies are things that can fly away, they aren't just loose in a park, you have to go inside a building to see them. But unlike a zoo where you are separated from the wildlife, in the butterfly park, the butterflies are fly freely about in a greenhouse garden and you can walk among them. They may even land on you. In such a setting, sheltered from the wind and with consistent lighting, if you have the right camera gear, you may have excellent photo opportunities. I was not so lucky that day but it didn't matter.

What was more interesting to me was to learn in a conversation with one of the caretakers that the butterflies are merely to entertain people and maybe raise awareness and money for the zoo and environmental causes. Due to the risk of disease and parasites, no butterflies raised in this building are released back into the wild, instead wild butterflies or their eggs or caterpillars must be collected outside to maintain the stock in the garden.

Even though I was a little sad to discover this twist on conservation, I really liked the butterfly park. The garden grounds surrounding the conservatory were just as lovely as going inside the building itself. And good for birding, too.

The tour guides hustled us through the garden way too quickly, maybe because it was a weekend. I probably could have talked them into leaving me behind to visit the zoo and come back for me later but I didn't bother. I wanted to explore the lodge grounds which have a small hiking trail. And I wanted to get some quiet time outside with a good book before dinner.

Actually, I didn't get so much quiet time. The lodge staff knew I was interested in birding because I had emailed about that when I made my reservation so while I was reading, someone came running to the restaurant pavilion to find me, “Quick! Come quick! A paradise flycatcher!” It was great!

After that, there were other birds to show me, including some members of a threatened species, the white-naped tit that had built a nest under the office roof overhang.

I ended up sitting at the park office for an hour or so talking with several of the staff about the birds and wildlife there, then there was dinner, a National Geographic video, and sitting around a campfire chatting (or zoning out) with the other guests. All of this was way much better than reading alone.

The next morning, S. Karthikeyan (aka. Karthik) came to lead the advertised nature walk. He is their wildlife and birding expert and to my surprise, Chirdeep from ThoughtWorks was with him. Chirdeep explained that Karthik had told him the Sunday hike would probably be interesting because there was a serious birder visiting at the lodge and Chirdeep told Karthik that he bet he knew who that was.

Since we were past migration season, there were not too many birds about but the ones sighted were excellent birds. And we got good looks at them. Probably the very best moment for me was being the first person to spot a pair of white-browed bulbuls. I didn’t know the name then but I knew I was looking at something really different from anything I had seen before. It’s a plain sort of bird but Karthik identified them and told me they are only found in these scrubby hill areas in southern India and Sri Lanka. We hiked for about three hours and I got 8 new birds for my list; too bad it couldn’t have gone on longer.

In the end, I never got to the zoo but that little weekend of hiking and sitting in the open-air pavilion surrounded by nature becomes more and more one of my favorite times in Bangalore.

Right now, if I knew that in about two hours I could be at Bannerghatta sitting on the mosquito-screened pavilion eating dal, some kind of chicken dish, and rotis with a big Kingfisher lager while twilight sets in and the evening birds and bats flit about, I’d be making arrangements in a hurry. It was the most relaxing weekend I had in my entire three months adventure in Bangalore.

To be continued...

My Bangalore Adventure, part 16: An Outing to Mascal

Our third weekend outing with the TWU students was a trip to Mascal. At the time, June 2009, nobody could really say what Mascal was, except that it was an outdoor adventure day at a super-secret village that didn't show up on any map. If we googled it, all we got were two links from other TWers blogging about their TWU experience with a few photos. But today, a Google search turns up a little bit more - a guy from another company went on a company outing there in July and wrote about it, and my co-trainer and friend Sharlene also wrote about it and posted photos.



So I will totally spill the beans. The outing was arranged through Cox & Kings, which is an Indian travel and event service founded in 1758 (I think they must have evolved their business model a few times since then). Here is the description straight from the brochure circulated among the TWU organizers:

Mascal is a small village in the lap of Mother Nature having the world famous monolithic Savandurga opposite it with backwaters of Manchinbele Dam built on River Arkawati for fantastic Aqua recreation. It is around 45 kms from Bangalore towards the town of Magadi. The safe water body and terrestrial surroundings make it the best location around Bangalore for a perfect Adventure experience.

According to the preceding TWU lore, we were in for a long day of kayaking, rock-climbing, and team-building games. I was pretty cool with that as I really like outdoorsy stuff. And the views of the farm fields and hills on the hike in were magnificent. But it was also a little disturbing. It's not exactly clear where public and private land begins. We followed a narrow footpath through a carefully plowed and planted field and the farmer, poor man, was quite upset that these casual city people (Indians and foreigners alike) were trampling the new shoots. I was pretty bugged too.



My relatives were farmers and I have spent a lot of childhood days on farms; walking between, not on or over the rows, is a natural for me but much of our group seemed totally oblivious until I and some others called it out. The tour guides could have handled that better and given us a heads-up before we started. On the other hand, maybe there's a payoff to the farmer included in the deal, in which case, then the farmer was just maximizing his interest.

But again, looking at the plowed fields, the cattle, sheep and goats rambling about the slopes near the village, I wondered about agriculture encroaching into former wilderness and the soil and water degradation that follows. Not to mention the disturbance and loss of native plants and wildlife. These are valid concerns, too. Maybe it is not an issue with this one village but certainly these are issues elsewhere and that farmer's tensions about his crops are echoes of other tensions in India (and everywhere) about rivers and dams, heritage and progress, natural lands and urban space, water, food, pollution.



Anyway, the hiking was great, breakfast and lunch were ported over to the campsite by kayak and we trekked further into the rough to do some paddling, swimming and rappelling off a cliff. Except for me. When I packed for India, I carefully searched online for etiquette and clothing advice and came to the conclusion that I could survive the three-month assignment with one pair of jeans, several pairs of business-casual khakis and no shorts. So when the kayaks paddled up with about six inches of brown water sloshing around inside, there was no way I was going to sit down in that in my only change of clothes.

Instead, while the others swam or kayaked over to the opposite side where the cliff was waiting, I explored deeper into the near-side brush for some David Sibley-style birding. David Allen Sibley is a famous birder and bird illustrator who advocates finding a likely spot and sitting still for about two hours. I discovered this method myself when I was about 11 years old. It really works for high-quality nature experiences of all sorts, not just birds. But I had a great time watching a Pied Cuckoo, a Common Iora and a Little Spiderhunter get their morning meals.



Meanwhile, everyone else spent about as much time sitting around on top of the cliff waiting to get roped up and go over, or sitting around at the bottom of the cliff, waiting for a free kayak to paddle back. Except for the tough guys and gals who decided to swim instead of paddle. I shared my binoculars with them and we watched the cliff action for awhile - someone got their ropes askew and ended up hanging upside down for awhile. Another person turned out to have a fairly serious phobia and never stopped screaming until they were back on their feet at the landing spot. Everyone else who tried it went down the face smoothly and reported it was a great experience.

Later, on the hike back to camp, I was dive-bombed by a red-wattled lapwing guarding its nest. And at the campsite, there were many looks at oriental skylarks, laughing doves, a great gray heron and the lovely purple heron. Venu (TW IS guy) and I watched it through the binoculars for a long time. Venu also was the first to spot the little shrine or marker on the top of Savandurga . With binoculars, we could even see the visitors coming and going up there.

All in all, it was a fun day. After lunch, we hung out at the campsite and played games - frisbee, cricket, and team competitions like trying to guide the most blind-folded teammates through a maze. Team Biju rocked!

And then, the icing on the cake, on the bus ride back to the Diamond District, as we came into Bangalore, Venu pointed out the window to a dark patch in the night-time cityscape. "That is the racetrack," he said. "It's beautiful."

What! There's horse-racing in Bangalore? I had no idea! Now there's an idea for a new adventure!

You can find pictures of all of the birds mentioned here at this Birds of India website.

Click here to read Sharlene's post.

And click here to see what that other guy wrote.

My Bangalore Adventure, part 13: Cariappa Park

As I mentioned in my last post, Cariappa Park turned out to be a little bit different from Lal Bagh or Cubbon Park. The guidebooks list it and you can see it on some maps, too, but it really didn't get my attention until I rode past it in a rickshaw. It looked really wild and green, like a forest not a park. Interesting. I put it in the mental files to investigate.

The next weekend turned out to be the first weekend of ThoughtWorks University. We had 16 students, a few from the Bangalore area but most of them from other parts of India and some from China. They had had a Thursday and Friday of orientation in the office with official TWU starting on Monday after the weekend. The plan was to do a some sort of Bangalore tour with the trainers on Saturday as an icebreaker.

BangaloreWALKS is a walking tour service that offers a variety of public and private outings around different themes. Maybe we should have gone for the Beer Walk, but instead, for a Saturday morning, we arranged a Victorian History tour on MG Road (MG stands for Mahatma Ghandi).

There was a lot of standing around listening to stories but that was OK for me because I really didn't know any of the history of how England came to power in India and the role the French and Sultan Tipu played. I also learned why Bangalore had so much real estate devoted to the Indian Army and Air Force and why Bangalore is a technology center for India today. For a little flavor of this walk, click here.

If you clicked that link, then you would have seen an inviting view of people having brunch on the balcony of a tall building (13th Floor). From here, our guide pointed out a band of greenery that started at one end of the army parade grounds (just visible in the photo). These were Cariappa and Cubbon Parks. I decided to check out Cariappa Park that afternoon.

The park is owned by the Army and only open to the public from 6-9 AM and 4-7 PM. A little bit odd but a lot of places in Bangalore and elsewhere have split hours like this. I figure maybe the Army wants to make sure they get some private time (pun intended) in there.

The guidebooks point out that a major feature of this park is a planned series of exercise stations installed along the paths. But some of the other references mention that this park has pretty much been left alone to grow wild and that is exactly what I found. In fact, it can feel just plain scary in spots.



I showed up about 4:30 PM and took the walk to my right, figuring it would circle the park and let me get a feel for whether I wanted to try any of the interior paths. After passing a rusted jungle gym type of structure, the walk became very overgrown and trashy with food leftovers and wrappers. It looked to me like a few homeless people had been making camp there. And a trio of wild dogs were quite assertive about one part of the path; maybe they win more times than lose. Anyway, I told them where to go and they agreed and disappeared.

The only good part about this section was finding an Eurasian Sparrowhawk in a nearby tree. We looked at each other for a minute or two and then it took off towards the Parade Grounds. I was past the spookiest part now and could see the walls that separated the park from more mundane military activities. The landscaping was a little more open here and soon I could see other paths with named markers. I could also see a few ordinary-looking people; middle-aged men taking a brisk walk, lovers sitting in shady spots.

The path looped back toward the entrance in sort of a figure-eight or butterfly pattern and the central lane took me past a very large fountain with, no-surprise, no water in it. Too bad. It looked like it was meant to simulate a large waterfall.



Not far from there was a memorial to Field Marshal Cariappa, a ground-breaking figure in modern-day Indian military history.

The memorial was dated 1996. Continuing on, I began to notice other signs pointing out structures or memorials from the same year, except the structures were either in ruins or, remarkably, in the case of an entire bandstand pavilion, completely gone. For the first time, I noticed that the paths were lined with broken light fixtures. The story was obvious and amazing. Here was a park, designed and laid out by the army in 1996 to honor this military man, and in less than 15 years it was completely neglected and abandoned to the elements.

You can read more about it here.

My Bangalore Adventure, part 3: Settling in

What a relief, in my apartment and "home" at last! I just crashed and slept until about 2 PM Bangalore time Saturday, that’s about a 12 hour nap. By then, it was too far into the day to feel ambitious so I decided to just unpack, assess the apartment and get a feel for what’s inside the Diamond District, plus figure out what to do about food (I had packed a few emergency rations like tuna and Lipton noodles, just in case.)

The apartment is a service apartment, which means it is always being let out to transient workers like me; nobody has intended it to be a permanent home, so it has the usual chips, cracks, splotches, and quick fix patches. It's spartan, but clean, roomy and bright. It feels a lot like Rogers Park, I’m going to Loyola and just moved out of my dorm and into an apartment with another girl and we got all this furniture at an “antique” shop on Broadway near Wilson Avenue (if you know Chicago, you’ll know what I mean).

The colors are nicely coordinated -- dark woods, white leather and white walls, maroon, orange, or lavender accents, white marble tile floors. In a few places, the wood is just bare plywood – like my bed which is a platform bed bigger than the mattress it holds. You can tell there used to be bigger mattress because the platform under the mattress has a border of black paint to match the box sides but the border stops short of the mattress and shows about four inches of raw wood stamped with the manufacturer’s markings. But that's ok because I read in the local newspaper that the majority of Indians still sleep on the floor, certainly many from necessity, but also for some by choice (try googling "sleeping on floor in India").

I decide the place needs some decoration. There are a few small paintings but also two empty shadow boxes on the living room wall, just black rectangles hanging there, and a bare bolt in my bedroom where another wall hanging or mirror used to be. I make a mental note to look for decorative items.

We have a nice balcony with potted palms and a pretty view, especially at sunrise, sunset and night. It looks into the interior of the Diamond District, which is mostly a park and swimming pool for the residents. Being a pretty serious birdwatcher, I was really excited to step out on the balcony and look for my first Indian bird.

There it was … a rock dove! AKA, a pigeon, the same thing you see millions of in Chicago and every other city.

Later I did see a different bird with dramatic bands of white on its wings when it flew. Turned out to be a common myna, which is more than just common, it’s like the starling of Bangalore. So, maybe the birding scene is not going to be that exciting here.



There is a little apartment directory by the telephone. Just like in a hotel. It says there are two restaurants, two groceries, a beauty salon, a fitness center, a dry cleaners, etc. but it could be outdated. I decide to get out and investigate on my own.

But first, how about a shower! It’s a two-bedroom apartment. One of the other trainers, Deepali, will be my roommate but she won't get in until Monday. My room has a separate bath (shower only, no tub) across the hall; Deepali’s room has a private bath. I have a full-size bed, she has twins; bothj bedrooms have room-size air conditioners, lockable cupboards and wardrobes, full-length mirrors and small writing desks; I have a sliding door out to the balcony; she has a TV. So I guess it all evens out.

The bath is equipped with the basics -- towels, soap, shampoo. Inexplicably, there’s a mothball in every sink. I’ve never seen this before. Maybe it’s a trick to keep bugs from crawling out of the pipes. Or it’s a low-cost air freshener substitute. Yes, that’s it. Later in the week Sharlene, another trainer, told me that her apartment on the first floor was subject to intermittent swamp gas odors from the drains. There's a lot of press coverage about water and sewer management issues; Bangalore has had so much growth the past few years, infrastructure is really stretched to keep up.

I get in the shower. No hot water. Great! There’s a small hot water heater attached to the wall above the toilet. Pipes go up into it. I wonder if maybe some valves need to be opened. It’s too high for me to look at closely so I take a cold shower. Later that day, while trying to figure out the light switches, I discover there’s a wall switch outside the bathroom that turns on the water heater. Maybe that is the problem.

I’m freshly dressed and ready to take a walk. The building manager knocks on the door. “Here is today’s paper. Is everything fine in the apartment? Would you like cleaning today” “Yes, it’s fine. No, they can come tomorrow.” “Ok, tomorrow then, madame. Enjoy your stay.” That was nice.

Now, how about that walk? No, wait a minute. Paul hasn’t heard from me in two days. I should send him an email, he’ll be waking up in Chicago soon. The apartment comes equipped with wireless internet so I switch it on. There is some very faint scribbling on the modem, a number that looks like 4567890. Once the computer fires up, I get the prompt to enter the network password. I enter 4567890. The wireless reports that it is connected but I can’t get on to the internet. Great! Another thing to deal with.

Maybe it’s just a temporary outage of some sort. Well, I'm not going to fool around with it now, I just want to get out and walk around.

To be continued: the Diamond District up close.