Travel Diaries: Panjim on foot

I’ve been to Goa five times over the last 18 months. Everytime so far I’ve visited different parts of it and have come to love the feeling of being “home” that comes with it.

I have vague memories of visiting Goa as a school kid in the 90’s. I remember loving Puri Bhaji and playing at the Miramar beach’s playground during a pilgrimage with my family. This time I was here because of the Story of Space.

‘The Story of’ is a arts and science biennale that seeks to “open-up” education to the masses. Space was the theme of this edition and participants take up spaces within the city of display their work or utilize for their workshops and experiences. .

With the Old Quarter hostel as my base, I explored Panjim on foot(and cycle) as I went discovering what Story of Space had in store for me.

The Ex-Nihilio escape room at Sukerkar house made us remember our long forgotten physics skills and use those concepts of waves and particles to find the keys to the puzzles.

The ‘Cycle through the Stars’ taught us the secrets of our Solar system as we cycled through its scaled down version mapped on Panjim streets.

Hojun Song asked us to standout and be true to who we are deep down so that his video codec algorithm would have trouble compressing us. So that Saturday afternoon saw a bunch of us letting go of our inhibitions and ‘perform’ for his camera.

Nick Sayers taught us to make our very own pinhole camera and asked us to make sure they are not mistaken for a bomb if we put them up at a public space.

Hands down ‘Evolution of Stars’ was the show stealer of the festival. You are taken through the life of a star in a way that I could never do justice describing in this blog post. There is news that Instityut B61 would return next year to reprise this production in Bangalore and You shouldn’t miss it then!

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In between this, I found time to gorge on some amazing goan food. Apart from the usual places like The Ritz Classic, Cafe Venite and Viva Panjim, I took every possible chance to step into the tiny chai shops to sample their fare. The following are three items I really enjoyed.

1. The complimentary Goan Breakfast from Anita Tea House by the Old Quarter hostel was just a yummy way to start the day.

2. The Rose Petal Icecream from Pure Icecream because we were burning in the hot afternoon sun was unlike any dessert I’ve had before.

3. And finally the fabled Ros Omlette on the road side carts near the Immmaculate Conception church.

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And like that my 3 days were up and I bid adieu to the city of no traffic lights as I headed back to Bangalore.

Travel Diaries: Surreal Kanyakumari

Kanyakumari was just a few hours away from Kovalam, the venue of 2015’s hackbeach, that I() decided to plan a day trip to visit the Southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. We toyed with the idea of taking a cab like a friend of ours did but in the end we opted to take the Island City Express to travel the roughly 3-hour journey.  This was turning out to be quite a low cost trip thanks to the company I had. One of the concerns I have with solo tripping is that it does burn a hole in your pocket if done for short periods of time.

Tip: To get to the station from Kovalam, you have to choose between a rick (tuk-tuk), cab or the bus.

So we caught the train around 12:30 and reach Kanyakumari by 15:00. We were staying at Vedanta – Wake up and since it seemed closeby we decided to walk there. As we walked to our Inn, we got our first taste of  the multi-ethnical, multi-cultural town of Kanyakumari.

After a brief break, we decided to head to the tip, where the action seemed to be; the sea shore. The Triveni Sangam is one of those rare places where you get to see the “meeting” of 3 bodies of water. This incidentally also means that at Kanyakumari you can see the sun rise from the sea and set into the sea as well. However the weather was gloomy and we did not get to see the sunset.

There is a Gandhi Mandapam where his ashes were kept before immersion. This is really a huge empty building populated in some parts by lovers.

As it grew darker we decided to explore the shops around and man! were we in for a surprise. The busy market was full of LED lit shops selling wares for Rs. 30, Rs. 20, etc. Entire shops dedicated to a single pricepoint.

We headed back to Vedanta to sleep early so that we could wake up to see a sunrise.

Unfortunately, the morning was just as gloomy and the crowds that had woken up with the hope of seeing a sunrise had nothing to do. Some of us walked down the stone jetty to the far end and sat down to take in the calmness of the morning but there were people selling watery tea and trying to con people into buying ‘pearl’ necklaces. There was this one guy who haggled with a family and brought down the price from 200 to 20. Later on in the market, I overheard another seller trying to sell similar necklaces to foreigners for $100. I wonder if anyone falls for their tricks.

When we got back we could see that the line to visit the Vivekanand Memorial snaked through the bylanes of the town and the memorial had not even opened yet. So we decided to skip it since we wouldn’t be able to make it back to Trivandrum in time. But we had plenty of time to kill, so I decided to go for a stroll along the coast.

Being from a coastal town, I felt surprised to see the amount of construction and development done to commercialize the shoreline and provide people a place to sit and see the ocean. The roads too were well maintained and the streetlights bright.

Finally it was time to go. We headed back to the train station and waited for the island city express to start.

Back we headed to Trivandrum.

 

A little off course…

It was May and I badly needed a break hence we planned a last minute impulsive getaway to Mahabalipuram(Mamallapuram) over a weekend. The trip was unplanned and people were few but the fun was good. All we did was eat and after starving through most of April I really needed it. The trip may have been too short but then frankly it was not the best time in the year to visit.

We stayed at the Lakshmi Guesthouse, where we were assured that we would get bakcup power for our AC room. We visited the Le Yogi for Breakfast(Crepes were had with a mug of good tea) and then headed to Seashore Restaurant and Shanti Cafe for a *long* lunch. The beach air was just what I needed and I ended up exhausted and slept prior to dinner. Dinner at Anand’s Moonraker’s was not as good as I had hoped it would be. Perhaps this was a lesson never to go for anything other than the real Moonraker’s. Next day’s breakfast was at Nautilus and that was because the Gecko Cafe was closed. Unfortunately as it was off season, there was no bacon anywhere.

Its definitely one of my favourite getaway spots. This was I think my third visit and I bought a well read copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods back as a memory of it.

Pincoding India

I was running through the book, Visualizing Data by Ben Fry and came across his pincode example for USA. I decided to replicate the example for India. Thus began my search for an geo-tagged dataset of indian pincodes. Sadly it does not exist. The best set of easily available data is hosted by datameet at http://pincode.datameet.org/

I ran the set through Tilemill and found large parts of India still untagged especially almost all of Maharashtra and Bihar. I asked Arun and he told me that ” there are no official public datasets available. But there is reasonably good coverage in the openstreetmap data. The simplest way to view the data is to probably use http://maperitive.net” which I will try to explore for now.

You could help by mapping your own pincode on this website. Go on, it only takes a minute.