2016 - The Year of Travel and Photography

With Srivani and Aravind. Beau Vallon beach, Seychelles

The much delayed blog. The year of 2016 has seen a lot of photography and travel. We happened to travel pretty much almost every month. Three countries visited. 6 National parks across 2 countries. The rainforest of southern India to the dry deciduous jungles of the north to the jungles and scrub lands of Madagascar and the tropical paradise called Seychelles. Aviation photography. Macro shots. Even a GSLV launch at SHAR. Filmed all sorts of aircraft from private jets and commercial airliners to Tupolev Tu-142Ms at Arakkonam. Spotted and filmed tigers, leopards, elephants, lemurs and a variety of birds. This is also the year when I bought my first DSLR out of my own money and amassed a collection of lenses, followed by another DSLR for Srivani. This year also saw the purchase of my first scooter, a Vespa VXL 150.

Chinese fishing nets, Fort Kochi

Fort Kochi, Cochin

Koder house, Kochi

Kochi

INS Vikrant, Kochi

The year began with the journey to Kochi in the state of Kerala. We were particularly interested in visiting Fort Kochi, which was a short boat ride away from Ernakulam. We spent three days visiting the Naval museum, beaches and doing a walking tour of the erstwhile European colony. I was in my notice period at MathWorks and life was super cool. I started building my first fish tank in the second week of January. This was a long call from the fish tanks I had back at IISc. This is my first fully self supported tank, thanks to a few shops I found around the town selling aquatic plants. In a few days I had a fully established nitrogen cycle in my tank and happy little fish swimming around a Dutch style layout of cubas, hair grass and ferns. We travelled to Singapore towards the end of the month on our first international trip together (and Srivani's first international trip ever). The trip to Singapore mostly focussed around natural and nature-inspired things like the Gardens by the Bay, S.E.A. Aquarium, Underwater World and the world famous Singapore Zoo and River Safari.

Universal studios, Singapore

Dolphin show, Underwater World, Singapore

View from the Singapore Flyer

Openbilled stork, Ranganthittu

I changed my job in February and got my first DSLR (out of my own money). I did some surveys and finally settled on a Nikon D7200 with an 18-140mm kit lens. This arrived sometime in the second week of February. I moved from MathWorks to Gwynniebee on Feb 22nd. We celebrated my birthday by taking Pramendra's Avenger on a 300 km spin. We visited Mysore, Srirangapatnam and the famous bird sanctuary at Ranganthittu. After all, I had just purchased a Tamron 70-300mm zoom lens a day before. I moved my aquarium to Hyderabad to keep it in a corner where it will never be disturbed. My mother takes care of switching the lights on and off. The tank now has a cannister filter with 4 filters and a very healthy bacterial culture. Gwynniebee was like a different world to me. My first contact with Java and web services.

Dutch style planted tank

Tamron 150-600mm lens

By the beginning or March I was looking to purchase a 600mm lens to do more serious wildlife photography. I zeroed in on the Nikon 200-500mm lens and the Tamron 150-600mm. I finally chose to go with the Tamron lens and bought it. We travelled to Bandipur National Park the following weekend to take the lens out for a spin. This was where I had my first wild leopard sighting. We stayed in cottages right in the midst of the forest. The sky on that night was absolutely magnificent. 

White throated kingfisher, Madivala lake

Indian leopard, Bandipur NP.

Jeep safari, Periyar Tiger Reserve

We travelled to Periyar Tiger Reserve in April. This was a trip which was long overdue. We did a short 3 hour hike in the tiger territory and the famous boat ride in the Periyar lake. I put my new Tamron 600mm to good use on Periyar's vast range of large herbivores and birds. We lived in a charming homestay with a balcony which overlooks the tiger reserve. I worked on a project on improving freshness of recommendations at Gwynniebee and submitted a short paper on our ideas to ACM RecSys'17 to see what the community thinks of the idea.

Periyar Tiger Reserve

Pair of bulbuls, Periyar Tiger Reserve

Agumbe, western ghats

St. Mary Islands

We did yet another long overdue trip in May. This time it was Udupi and the western ghats. We hired a Royal Enfield Bullet in Udupi and rode around. We visited the St. Mary island and lived on a sea facing cottage on Malpe beach. The next day we rode all the way to Agumbe and visited the rainforest research centre. This was a month before the monsoon began. So it was all pretty dry and hot. We bought a new hamster this month and named him Kiwi. We did a day trip to Chennai on 22nd May. This was just a short hop on Jet Airways' ATR-72-500 to see and shoot things from the sky. We managed to get a clean shot of the Arakkonam naval base and the Boeing P8Is and Tupolev Tu-142Ms stationed there. However, that shot cannot be shared online for obvious reasons. On the job front, I interviewed with Amazon on 28th May. I cleared the interview and chose not to join Amazon and instead pursue my hobbies and interests instead.

Udupi

Malpe beach, Udupi

Vespa VXL 150

June took us to another dream destination of mine. Ranthambhore National Park. The tiger capital of India, it stood up to its name as we encountered a tigress with three cubs on our first safari there. We encountered a tiger on every safari we had there (a total of 6 safaris), save one (came across a leopard on this one). This was by a long shot the best forest I ever visited. We did a one day trip to the forts of Jaipur. We visited Amer palace, Jal Mahal and the world's biggest cannon atop the Jaigad fort. We got a lovely scooter in the second week of July. A matt black Vespa VXL 150. It was an absolute beauty to see and to ride. The very next week we rode 300 Km on the Vespa to Ranganthittu and back. This time with the 600mm.

Amer fort, Jaipur

Arrowhead, RTR-4, Ranthambhore

Arrowhead, RTR-4, Ranthambhore

Near Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur

Srivani joined Christ University for her M.Tech. in July. We visited Bijapur for Amogh's wedding on 7 July. Gol Gumbaz and other forts from the bygone days. The rest of July was pretty boring as we just kept visiting neighbourhood lakes to sight birds. We started planning for a major trip to Africa for the year end. We started comparing Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya to visit. I built my second PC in July. This had no money constraints and I comfortably blew about one lakh rupees on it on one day. I retained my Coolermaster Thunder 500 PSU and built around it. Intel i5 6600K, 8 GB DDR4 and 360 GB of SSD storage and an MSI Gaming M3 motherboard. Beefing up the whole thing is a new Nvidia GTX 970 OC GPU. The GTX 970 got a bit cheaper thanks to the entry of the 10 series GPUs from Nvidia. Now I'm able to max out any game in ultra quality. I ended up playing and completing CoD Advanced Warfare, FC4, FC Primal, F1 2015, DCS: MiG 21 and FSX with heavy scenery and traffic mods installed.

Srivani playing F1 2015 on the new rig.

Binocular microscope.

Suresh's art space

August took us to Tirupati for Pavan's wedding. Entire Gwynniebee group was there. It was a fun two days. I started building a 250mm quadcopter. This was to be an FPV quadcopter based around the FatShark FPV system that I purchased on my trip to the US last year. We started finalizing on the year end trip in August and zeroed in on Ethiopia. However, the Indian mission in Ethiopia warned us against travel as the country was in a state of emergency. We then moved our focus to Madagascar. We booked a round trip to Madagascar and Seychelles by the end of the month.

Air Costa E-190 departing BLR.

ISRO was launching GSAT-7 using the GSLV on September 8. I took my 600mm and went all the way to Sriharikota to film the launch. We travelled to Chennai by train and then further on to Sullurpet and then to Pulicat lake by jeep from there. We filmed the launch from the Pulicat lake, about 4 km away from the second launch pad. It was like a launch out of a textbook. We began planning itineraries for the Madagascar trip. National parks and points of interest. And how to get around the country and the languages and customs that one should be aware of. This was going to be a trip outside our comfort zone.

GSLV launch, SLP, SHAR

GSLV launch

We did a long post-monsoon drive in the western ghats in October. Sakleshpur, Mandalpatti, Madikeri and the Rosary church at Hassan. The scenery was stunning as was the night sky. I caught and filmed my first snakes in the wild. After hearing that Gokul was made an offer, I began talking to Ramnath about joining his startup, BendFlex. We had a few chats and later I decided that it'll be an exciting move to join BendFlex after completing a year in Gwynniebee.

Green tree vine snake, Sakleshpur

Rosary church, Hassan

app based light/fan control

November had no travel in it. This was to be more than compensated for in the month of December. I built a radar out of the HB100 doppler radar module. This is my first ever circuit built entirely with CAD and etched on copper clad board. I used KiCAD for this. It accurately measured speed of incoming objects. Later in the month I installed an app based home automation system in our bedroom. This system uses HC05 bluetooth module to connect a smartphone to an Arduino which controls the fan and light. The smartphone has a simple app with voice controls as well as buttons. This was written using the MIT AppInventor. This project was inspired by the need for it and the EFY November 2016 issue.

250mm quadcopter

HB100 doppler radar

December saw us travel to Madagascar. I also came to office and worked an entire day on 10th December to fix some production issue with Sai. We geared up for Madagascar from about the middle of the month. Corresponded with several hotels for information on travel and mentally chalked out a plan. This is the first trip where I used Open Street Maps extensively. I actually purchased the Osmand+ app while waiting at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport. I bought a new phone, the Motorola Moto E3 Power, primarily for its no-frills stock Android and the insanely good battery life. I began building a model railroad in December. This is a HO/OO scale replica of an old British steam locomotive, hauling coal-filled wagons. This is presently shelved and is far from complete.

Outskirts of Antananarivo

Citroen taxi, Antananarivo, Madagascar

Chameleon, Ankarafantsika, Madagascar

We left for Madagascar on 22 December, via Hyderabad, Mumbai and Mahe, Seychelles. We had a rendezvous with Aravind, who flew all the way from Washington DC via Ethiopia. We proceeded onto Antananarivo on 23 December. It was an awesome 8 days in Madagascar. We visited the Lemurs' Park and downtown Antananarivo on the first two days before proceeding to Mahajanga to visit the northern coast of the island. We visited Ankarafantsika national park near that area and spotted Crowned Sifakas and some reptiles. We continued to Andasibe and the famous rainforests of Mitsinjo, Andasibe, Mantadia and the community park. We spotted several critically endangered lemurs like the Indri and the Diademic Sifaka. We continued on to Toamasina to visit the Ivoloina park and a full day trek through typical Malagasy villages. We flew back to Seychelles and spent a whole night roaming the streets of the island, Mahe. We visited a few scenic spots, bid adieu to Aravind and flew back to India via Abu Dhabi. The new year's night was spent in the Abu Dhabi Intl' Airport.

Tree boa, Andasibe, Madagascar

This year got me into travel and photography. We began planning several trips and had even booked trips to Cambodia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka for the summer of 2017. With concrete itineraries of Jordan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar, I've my hands full for the next few years. I'm currently serving the last week of my notice period at Gwynniebee and am moving to BendFlex by the end of the month. The year of 2016 added two more hobbies to an already long list. I'll wait and see how many more will the upcoming years add!

Crowned Sifaka, Ankarafantsika, Madagascar