Moving Up

It all started with a missed bus. After some two weeks of deliberating, on February 28 2009,  me and Priyo were finally out at the Anand Vihar ISBT, hoping to get one of the frequent- so we were told- buses to Almora. So we arrive bright and chirpy at 6 in the morning only to...

A Remarkable Man

Here's something I came across on Project Gutenberg. This is a book published in 1899 by the English adventurer/painter/traveller/raconteur called Arnold Henry Savage Landor- an account of his somewhat alarming, but extremely interesting travels and travails in Southern Tibet in 1897 called In the Forbidden Land.Pic: The Tibetan weather and Landor's hardships leave their mark...

Map Woes Part 4

(...continued from Map Woes Part 3)A recent visit to the Survey of India map sales office in Delhi was most frustrating. The people there were extremely reluctant to show me any maps without me first telling them the exact sheet number- they probably even need the latitude and longitude- and even then could only give...

Map Woes Part 3

(...continued from Map Woes Part 2)So anyway, I went to McLeodganj shortly after that year, and in a small bookshop near the Dalai Lama’s monastery, I found two sheets of the Leomann Map series, these ones dealing with two of Himachal Pradesh’s regions. I was dumbstruck by their detail. There were clear ridge-lines and marked...

Map Woes Part 2

(...continued from Map Woes Part 1)So I looked for other maps. Some of these I found in books, and the information I tried to locate with the help of GE as well as Wikimapia (which is better marked but not always trustworthy). It’s a painstakingly slow process, but at least I was making progress.The Eric...