KOTAGIRI (Land of Kov tribe/ row of mountains)

To break the madness of the city and from our routines, we wanted to go to a place which was not a typical tourist place. Therefore we opted for Kotagiri. Kotagiri is a hilly town situated in the Nilgiris of Tamilnadu state. This place is near Ooty. The distance from Kotagiri to Ooty is approximately 29kms. Since Kotagiri is in Tamil Nadu, the official language is Tamil.  Since it's a tourist place, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi and English can be used for communication.

We wanted to stay in the middle of nature for a couple of days hence we opted for Adubettu leisure homes in Kotagiri.

This place is really awesome. Greenery everywhere, calm and serene, the chirping of birds, huge Bisons and green hills. One suggestion from me, you should have very good driving skills to reach the homestay, as it's in the middle of Tea estates and forest. The roads here are curvier, bumpy, Kucha, sharp and steep slopes to reach the place.

 Adubettu leisure homes is in the heart of Nature. The accommodation here is wooden houses on stilts. When we visited, they were three cottages with a small play area where we can spend time playing badminton and cricket. (We had carried our own items for playing with us).

The best thing about this place is the bisons. You will definitely spot bisons in the estate premises. We spotted a number of bisons too during our visit. As they were coming nearer to our cottage from the nearby hills, we went inside our rooms and had a glance from our windows. We are fortunate enough that these beautiful bisons chose to spend time right below our cottages for more than an hour.

This place is very quiet since it is far away from crowded human habitation. This place has absolute silence except few estate workers in the morning hours. Kids might find it difficult to stay at such places since there are no T.V. and cell phone signals. Because of our previous travels, my kiddo was well trained to stay at such places.

Although our main motto of the visit was birding, we had very good sightings of bisons within the estate premises. Every day from 4 pm you can expect routine visitors I mean bisons. we had good birding experience at this place too. I will share the list of birds we spotted here in a later post.

On our way to this stay, we met with a couple of like-minded people who were on their way to do Bear watching. I am hoping one day that I will go bear watching too.

As we are vegetarians and the food here was predominantly non-veg, we opted to have all our meals at Kotagiri town.  Though the town is just 5 km from the estate it took us a lot of time to reach there due to Kucha and bumpy roads. We had our lunch and dinners at Hotel Nahar's  Retreat and Wellness, Kotagiri.

The beautiful serene surroundings, appealing wooden houses, sightings of bisons, wonderful hills all around, relaxing games with friends, scary roads, awesome climate - it was all a feast for eyes and pleasant memories brought home.

The days I cherished here makes me tell - "one more time please…..".

Finally here's my rating

Accommodation: 4****

Food: NA (since we didn't have any food here)

Location: 5 * * * * *

Shetty Kere

Location : Shettikeri ,Gadag, Karnataka
Date : 27-Jan-2009.
Time: 4 AM to AM

List of birds seen

1. Common Sandpiper.
   
2. Euresian Collar Dove.
   
3. Red watiled lapwing.
   
4. Brahmini duck.
   
5. Babbler.
   
6. Ashy crown sparrow lark.
   
7. River turn.
8. Grey frankolin.
9. Little egret.
10. Silver bill.
11. Intermediate Egret.
12. purple rump sunbird.
13. Purple Sunbird.
14. Peacock.
15. Greater cow call.
16. Short eared owl.
17. Barn swallow.
18. Wire tailed swallow.
19. Long tailed Shrike.
20. Laughing dove.
21. Red vented bulbul.
22. Un id pipit.
23. Montaguse harrier.
24. Grey heron.
25. Jungle crow.
26. House crow.
27. Northern Shoveller.
28. Rose ringed parakeet.
29. Pond heron.
30. Iora.
31. Marsh harrier.
32. Bee eater.
33. Common Myna.
34. Pied Bushchat.
35. Blyth's reed warblur.
36. Plain prenia.
37. Green sandpiper.
38. Bar headed goose.
39. Chestnut bellied sandgrouse.
40. Crown headed gull.
41. Green shank.
42. Spotted sandpiper.
43. Glossy ibis.
44. Kentesh plover.
45. Little stint.
46. Brown shrike.
47. Black ibis.
48. Black drango.
49. Stone chat.
50. Black tailed godwit.
51. Rufous tailed lark.
52. Southern grey shrike.
53. Brahmini Myna.
54. Indian Roller.
55. Pied crested cuckoo.
56. Little egret.
57. White brested water hen.

Sewing Diary with Allure

Hello,

It has been a long time since I last blogged. In this time, I learned few things like sewing, baking, quilling and also tested few diet routines. From the past one year, I am stitching my own  dresses. I always had the wish to share my sewing experiences with you all. In the meanwhile, I did a lot of practice to stitch a decent dress.Here is my first attempt at sharing my sewing ideas.

 Allure from Usha Janome

To make a dress more appealing one needs to give proper final touches like piping, making pleats, adding lace to the frock etc. The pain comes in doing piping neatly in a prefessional way. It's not only time consuming but even a slight disturbance while sewing spoils the whole look. There is an old saying that a lazy man will have more ideas on how to do a work easier. That is where you have foots for sewing machines. Now you may be wondering that what is meant by foot?



A foot is a plate which you attach to the sewing machine. Typically it is attached to the rod near the needle, so that the needle comes in the middle of the plate to give stitches to the cloth.A foot is a handy accessory for the people who aim for perfection. Foots play a major role in stitching. Without the foot we cannot stitch anything in a sewing machine  and it's the place where the two threads join together and gives stitching.Allmost all sewing machines comes with Basic foot along with some accessories.




First few months I tried with basic foot and felt that I need a bit more perfection while doing things like bias binding, piping, pleats and making an applique design.There I felt the need for foots. I purchased foots like piping, 1/4th seam, piping and a few more online.The perfection which comes from the specialised foots makes these foots really worth investing.



As foots make a difference in sewing so as pattern making, Pattern making needs a lot of creativity to imagine how the dress should look like. Before I jump directly into pattern making, I would like to share about some  common foots which I use in sewing. Believe me, it's worth having these foots at home. One foot which I admire more is "All purpose foot".  It  is just awesome, I stitched my son's  torn shoe velcro with the help of this foot.



Here are some of the foots which I am currently using.

                                       

                                   

         

Zig-Zag foot

In my previous post, I had explained about sewing machine foots. Here is my attempt to introduce you to one such foot. Here comes the first one called as All purpose foot.

             

                                    All purpose Foot or Zig -Zag foot or Basic foot
                                                  
Zig-Zag foot - All purpose foot- Basic foot

Here comes the first foot called as All-Purpose foot or zig-zag foot. I prefer to call it as a zig-zag foot. It's called as  All Purpose foot because, you can stitch with this  foot from straight stitch to zig-zag stitch.This foot is used to sew on bulky layers of fabric, to do bulky seams, and it is very useful on stitching textured fabrics like denim, fleece, velvet etc. For beginners do use 1/4 seam foot to do a straight stitch. General settings for All purpose foot depends on the thickness of the material which you are using and the length of the stitch one needed. But for general fabric like cotton I go with stitch length in between 2-3, Pattern selector as A for straight  stitch or C for Zig-Zag stitch in Allure, and Thread tension as 4.

Nannaj (The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary)

Nannaj

The Romantic couple

The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary


Nannaj is a village in solapur district of Maharastra, India. The land of Nannaj is semi-arid and drought prone.The climate of this region is very hot summer,dry and mild winter.The forest in this reason is thorn forest and dry grass lands.Rainfall to Nannaj is very less.

Nannaj is famous for wildlife sanctuary and especially for Great Indian Bustards(Ardeotis nigriceps). Hence it is called as Great indian Bustard Scantuary,and it is named as Jawaharlal Nehru Bustard Sanctuary in 1979.Great Indian Bustard in Nannaj was first noticed by MR.B.S.Kulkarni in 1972.Its because of Mr.Kulkarni's extensive efforts to save this endangered species, Dr. Salim Ali visited Nannaj and started research on this project. Great Indian Bustards(GIB) are locally called as Maldhok and it is a endangered big bird.The natural habitant of Great Indian Bustard is short grass plains.GIBs prefere open grass lands.

Here is an account of our trip to Nannaj

After a rainy day I visited Nannaj along with few bird enthusiasts to the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary.Prior permission to visit this place is must.I spoke with few wild-life research students in the guest house premises and found that one group was doing research on Wolves  and another group was doing research on Blackbucks .A girl in the Wolves research team  explained very clearly about the nature of Wolves. My conversation with the group went on and now it was time for us to see Queen of the Grasslands. we took a guide inside the sanctuary as he is familiar with the surroundings .He asked us to enter into a closed mud hut to watch the GIBs, as the Great Indian Bustards are shy in nature.

The mud hut

We found a  herd of Blackbucks, pack of wolves, pack of Dogs ,after much await we found the Queen of the grassland flying towards us and landed away.To my surprise, I found the GIB to be much larger than what I had imagined .We spotted around 8 Great Indian Bustards.They were there for a period of an hour and then flew off to another grass land on the opposite side.We were still there in the hut to see more GIBs. During this time we saw a pack of Dogs hunting Blackbucks. And on the other side of the land we found a herd of wolves in a playful mood.

The time when I visited Nannaj, the forest department had cleared all the big trees over a huge area of land to make the grass land GIB friendly and to grow the Great Indian Bustard's population.

Dry Grassland

It was a pleasure to the eyes to see Blackbucks playing and jumping on each other along with Great Indian Bustards in the beautiful grass lands.

Great Indian Bustard and Blackbuck

School children from the local school visited the Sanctuary on the same day and tried spotting birds with one of our friends Spotting scope.

These are the list of species of Birds we saw in Nannaj

1.Red -Wattled Lapwing, Yellow-Wattled Lapwing.

2.Chestnut Bellied Sandgrouse

3.Sykes-Lark

4.Indian Courser

5.Jungle Babbler

6.Jungle Bush Quail

7.Red Necked falcon
8.Short Toed Snake Eagle
9.Eurasian Collared Dove
10.Common Hawk Cuckoo
11.Indian Robin
12.Munias
13.Francolins
13.Spotted Owlet
14.Raptors
15.Indian Silver Bill
16.Pipits
17.Pied Bush Chat
18.House Sparrow
19.Indian Peafowl,Peacock
20.Baya Weavers
21.Small Minivets
22.Black Shouldered Kite
23.Common,Jungle  Myna
24.Jungle,House Crow


Apart from this we also spotted few garden Lizards(which are food for Great Indian Bustards),Red mites and etc..........

Coming to Accommodation one can stay at Forest department guest house which is preferable or can stay at Solapur hotels.The distance from Solapur to Nannaj is approximately 22 kms and the travel time is approximately 30mins.

Muthathi

Muthathi is a settlement situtated on the banks of the river Kaveri near Malavalli, Karnataka, India.

Muthathi is 100Kms from Bangalore.The route is as follows : Bangalore>kanakapura road>Sathanur>Muthathi Anjaneya Swami temple>Muthathi village.

Muthathi is associated with Hindu diety Lord Hanuman called here as Hanumantharaya and Goddess Sita devi .River Kaveri flows along this area, Muthathi is coverd with dense and lush green forests,and comes under the Kaveri Wildlife Sanctuary.You will be excited to see yourself driving in the middle of the forest.

Muthathi is also a good place for Bird Watching.

Swimming at kaveri river is dangerous,its because of whirlpools and strong currents.

Preferred transportation to this place is one's own vehicle or a taxi,its beacuse the bus service to this place is not very regular.

Here is how our day trip to Muthathi went

We reached Muthathi and visted the temple of Lord Hanuman. The view from temple premises is beautiful,we found a small trace of water falls from temple premises.As the temple is in the middle of the forest and there were plenty of trees around the temple,we saw monkeys and aslo a Rufous treepie.

Then we headed back to Muthathi village. To our surprise the place was  totally flooded. people came there in lorry and cars. And the entrance where we find the river was not so clean it is filled totally with feathers of birds,legs,hands and head of goats, yaaaaaak its totally horrible. We went  a bit further to see a clean spot and after our 15min travel we found totally a good place and it was very clean,calm,and beautiful,and importantly nobody was there.

We settled there with all our packages and enjoyed Swimming, birding .We spotted few water birds, bees, butterflies,Wagtails,Cormorants, big fish ,Asian Paradise flycatchers, Orioles, Leaf birds,Monkeys,White cheeked BulBuls ,and more.

Asian Paradise Fly-catcher.

Wagtail

Yellow browed BulBul

Can you spot it. if so leave a comment with the name of this beauty.

We had packed our food from home and enjoyed having lunch beside the river bed.There are no hotels here.

Apart from cleanliness in the entrance of the village everything is nice here.You will feel yourself totally recharged in the middle of the lush green forest everywhere, a calm sky and serene water all around with the calls of birds makes this place even more beautiful.

I captured the calmness of nature in my Cam.

Pied Bushchat

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Butterflies

Fish inside the water

Other Places you can viist after visiting Muthathi are Soligeri hill, Bheemeshwari or Cauvery fishing Camp, Mekedhatu, Sangama ,Galibore fishing camp and Chunchi falls.

Mekedhatu( I call it as Rocky land)

HTC Wildfire

HTC Wildfire is an Android based, entry-level smartphone from HTC
A good handset worth its price.

Specification of HTC Wildfire are

It has CPU Speed of 528MHZ and the platform in which it is built is Android,
The memory of HTC Wildfire is 512 MB ROM and 384 MB RAM,
The display size of Wildire is  8.13cm along with touch sensitive screen, (capacitive)
The dimensions are 10.67 cm (L) x 6.04 cm.(W) x 1.22cm.(T).
IT comes with internal GPS antenna.

Network specifications are:

HSDPA/WCDMA (900/2100 MHz)
GSM/GPRS/EDGE (8050/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Bluetooth 2.1,A2DP,FTP,OPP, and PBAP
Wi-Fi. IEEE 802.11 b/g

Other specifications of HTC Wildfire are

1.Stereo audio jack is 0.35cm
2.It has standard micro-USB.
3.5 megapixel color camera with auto focus and flash and
4. expansion slot (microSD card)
5.Optical track pad
6.Given a charger it also works as a data cable.


Highlights of HTC Wildfire are

It has polite ringtone, it means some phones ring and ring and ring! with HTC Wildfire the ringer volume drops as soon as you pick the phone.

The Stated MRP of HTC Wildfire is Rs.17,490. And I bought it from Flipkart for just 10k.

Samsung phones in the same range dont have flash while HTC Wildfire has flash.

Optical track pad in HTC Wildfire is very useful to navigate up-down-side. And to take a picture from camera you can use this OTP.

Wildfire runs on Android version of 2.2