Kerala trip: Rest of it

It's actually no fun posting the pics months after the excitement of coming back from a nice trip has died down. But to keep with the flow, after having posted pics of the first part of the trip in Cochin, I will post the rest.

I have become so seriously involved in photography that I have little to write these days. The information overload of trying to know how to get the best out of your equipment can be daunting. The budget always comes up too! :( And posting images on my facebook artist page and getting instant 'Like's and comments from friends who would have never read it on the blog is an altogether different thing! :)

Anyways I won't punish you further! Here are the pics :)

Here was a local romeo zooming off into the munnar hills on his bike :)

Any grocery shop worth its salt has to have a few varieties of bananas.

Going by the lavish ads the jewelry and saree industry enjoyed, it felt like these were the two prospering industries there (recession or not). We rarely saw any other billboards. It also looked like most of the models were from Mumbai. We even got to see an ad with what looked like Sayali Bhagat in one of them.

Why was I so interested in billboards of all the things? Some of the road journeys got a little monotonous and these were the interesting things we saw. And another thing is that each of these ads is a lesson in itself, if one wants to learn the art of fashion/commercial photography. How it can be and in some cases, how it shouldn't.

One thing that I think that definitely distinguishes Kerala is the windowless buses there. Keeps one completely in tune with the elements! ;)

Munnar was the best part of the trip if you ask me. It was unlike the other places that I have seen before. The tea estates had a charm. But it was the trees in the forests with trunks more than a 100 feet tall, growing on steep hills towering above us. All this after we ascend so many hundreds of meters up into the hills. The sheer scale was hard to imagine!

The main part of the Munnar town was a dusty little high altitude garbage dump. Was a little embarrassing to see what we are turning a pretty little hill station into. Rubble strewn all over, many new constructions not in tune with the landscape, and heaps of burning garbage. No, I did not take any pics there. :(

It is very hard to express the beauty of a place when every time you click the picture, the camera seems to interpret the scene in a different way, although equally beautiful. Very enigmatic.

And then it was down into the hot humid plains into the backwaters. The mandatory houseboat ride. The best part of this ride was the unique glimpse into life along the backwaters. Unique because I feel that there is nothing else like this in this country.

The last part of the trip was Kovalam beach. We did go to Kanyakumari but I did not like the place. Quarrelsome hotel managers and bad service marked our stay there and we realised that apart from the novelty of being on the tip of India and the Vivekananda rock, there isn't much to the place.

Kovalam beach was not such a great beach but it has this nice light house that you should not miss. The view from the top is worth dying for. ;)