Travel in South India 1 - Tamil Nadu

• Chennai

Has a nice beach. What else? urrrr....
Marina beach Egmore train station
St. Thomas church Rippon's building

• Kachipuram

Ekambareshvara Temple (mango temple)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekambaranatha_Temple

relating to Shiva and Pavati's marriage... a popular place of blessing marriage.

Kailasanatha Temple

One of the most beautiful and oldest temple in India. Very unique and stylish.

Varadaraja Temple

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varadharaja_Perumal_Temple

Has a unique deity in the pool and show up once every 40 years

• Mamalapuhram

The glory of Pallava dynasty.
Krishna's butter ball Ajuna's penance
Patha Rathas Shore temple

• Pudicherry

French colony until 1971, no wonder the major tourist here are all French.

• Tanjavur

Chola's UNESCO big temples
No. 1: Brihadeeswarar Temple (means big temple)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadeeswarar_temple
King Rajaraja I (the builder): Big big big, I want everything big
Turbo: you texan?
Entrance

No.2: Airavatesvara Temple
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airavatesvara_Temple
Entrance
No.3: Brahadeeshwar Temple (another one called big temple)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangaikonda_Cholapuram
No1 and 3 were actually build by father and son. No wonder they look so similar.
Nandi
Dancing Shiva (Nataraja)

• Trichy/Srirangam

The real temple town.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Ranganathaswamy_Temple_(Srirangam)
Gopura Gopura
and Gopura
This Sri Ranganathaswamy temple is humongous and has perfect concentric layout, it has 7 layers walled enclosues.

• Madurai

Nayak Palace
Court yard Dance hall
Not really a "palace" from north India perspective

Meenakshi Temple

Entrance Lotus ponds and gopura
Thousand Pillars HallNandi
Very well maintained and impressive temple. Sorry its gorgeous gopuras are all in maintenance.

• Kanniyakumani

The southest town in India, quite and peaceful but full of tourists.
Vivekananda Memorial

The beach behind kumari temple is the southest point, it is the junction of Arabic sea, Bengal bay and India ocean.

Travel in North India

So, got arranged to travel around North India. The slogan for India tourism is "Incredible India"

Indeed, you need to travel around to tell how "incredible" it is. Plus, if you live here for a while (like myself). Gee, yes, it is indeed a incredible place... Lot of things out your rational imagination.

- Agra

One of the most important sightseeing place in India, because it has Taj Mahal right here

Taj Mahal

Without being Taj Mahal, you cannot claim to have been in India. But when I was in Taj Mahal, the cleaness and peaceness made me feel I am not in India.
Agra Fort

Shadows red fort in Delhi immediately
Fatepur Sikri

It is Akbar's DUBAI...

- Varanassi

The holy city for Hiduism. Gosh, you see the real life, and its mixture with holy and insane, noise and quiteness, odors and scents...

- Khajuraho

Temple of love

After looking around these erotic panels for 2+ hours, I started to forget what was the initial motivation to come here. Oh, it did give me the motivation for following Tamil Nadu trip.

- Jaipur

In parallel with the influence of Mughali in north india, Rajathani became a very strong and unique style at north and Jaipur could be the most signficant presentative of Rajathani style.

Wind Mahal

City Palace Museum

Amber Fort

Shiraz from Sante India

I guess I really had no idea what I am getting when edinto a dimmed looking wine shop here.
A clerk pulled out this one from a shelf. Shiraz from Kanataka (I think). Asked around in the wine shop here but seems no one has clearly idea where it exactly came from. All I heard is it is a nice wine, with a Rps500 price tag and a layer of dust (not very convincing for sure). And it is even not using a cork. Only thing good is the way they stored it, lflat and at a dark corner (better than the most US wine shop which stands straight with blight light). Anyway..

Turned out it is surprisingly good. I was impressed by the flavor. The level of acid is just about right for a Shiraz. And the bitter and sweetness kicked-in after the initial acid is very pleasant. With roughly $10 bucks, this is definitely money to value.

I am just about the complete my journey here... guess not many changes to try others anymore. But this one, did give me a very good perception for India wine, even they are really not famous at all.

Suzuki Wagon, Esteem, Honda City and Toyota Innova

Been India for two months.... it is quite interesting to observe the auto market here.

The first car I got when arrived at Delhi is Suzuki Maruti Wagon.
A small compact car. It was so small that two adults - driver and myself, plus luggage almost explode it. It was smelly. But seems very good on maneuvering (I am never the driver). However, it is just too small to handle my whole family (even partially). Thus, with less than 2 weeks, Wagon disappeared



The second car was a black Suzuki Maruti Esteem. (Oh, Suzuki Maruti is the brand name here... It is a joint venture between Suzuki from Japan and Maruti from India local, typical product of automotive protectism). It was less smelly. However, I guessed it might be used as a racing car or something before. The chassis seems going to break into pieces at any moment. Can hear the squeezing noises all the time on India's bumpy road.



The third one is a white Suzuki Maruti Esteem. It is also aged like previous one, but slightly better. Our daily driver apparently know how to handle this car extremely well.
However, because seating posture, Wagon actually sit more comfortably. But Esteem apparently is more space and have more juicy (still limited).




I accidental got a chance to take a Honda City. It was a funny experience. The reason was I need to visit Honda facility here at Noida for two days. So, implicitly, my company had to arrange a nice, clean, almost brand new Honda City to sent me there... Honda City is extremely popular here. It has right size and right price for india market... It is very smooth, enough space and quite powerful (has VTEC!)...My boss who used to drive Acura in US have to downgrade to drive a city here :) as this is the best option (the car here is generally at least twice more expense than in US, we checked with couple dealers!). But the traffic cross Delhi was so bad.... less than 50Km but took us around 2 hr... and I got dizziness after the long drive.....

One worth mentioning is Toyota Innova here. It seems extremely popular here. We arranged to have it (with different driver) multiple times whether family go out together for a mid/long-range trip, Delhi, Jaipur, Tamil Nadu etc.... It is very spacy and comfy, by far, is the best car we had in here. sorry, only one picture showing the same model on bumpy road here.

Driving in India

Driving is definitely a challenge in India.

Driving on local is one experience, unruled traffic, endless honking, unexpectd U-turn and reverse diretion drivings are all eyes opener..... some time back when driving in England, I suffered from the "implicit rules" at round-about. Here, the rules aremuch more implicit and sophisticate thus too complicate to be understood by foreigners.

This is the ordinary road after moonson season.









Driving on highway is another one. Firstly, the definition of highway here is quite different than whatever the highway or autobahn is. You will be able to see ALL KINDS OF weird things happening on highway. Pedestrian crossing, cow cart (or camel) and rickshaw on highway.





Pedestrian crossing highway










Safety load limit? forget it.











What safety instrument required on vehicle? Don't ask something like Air bag or child safety seat here.











Complain about honking? Horn please!!!








The key is just whether you can get a good driver :)




Take it easy, we still can handle this with one feet up.

Gurgaon India - where is here!?

So, Gurgaon, India, a new born city southwest of India. Other than these malls, these are still a lot going on here. Transportation is always a challenge.

The raining season, which caused a signficant damange of the road, just over.... So, it is all bumpy road everywhere.

And on the way to office, on a fine day, it is dusty all over the place...

and you can see a ayuveda clinic on the road side... Yes, that tilting tent....

Interesting shopping event

It was a peaceful Sunday... We just came back from a nice Jaipur trip on Saturday. So, taking a rest and the whole family had a late start on Sunday..
So, after 2PM, my wife decided to go Ambiance Mall, north of Gurgaon. It claims to be the biggest mall in India, from end to end is about 1KM. I think the claim to overstated. It does not seem to be that huge...

This is not the first time we visit Ambiance. We generally like it. It has a good mixture of high/end stores. Even the mall is not completely finished and still has empty retail space.

Anyway, so we had some good shopping, enjoyed the dinner and then went down to the big bazaar (the low cost retailer like Walmart in US).

Unpon the open of escalator, there were some people rushed in even when we were trying to get out of it... the atmosphere was weird, but we soon realized the big bazzar was shutting itself down.

I grabbed one guy who looked like the manager and asked what is going on... his answer is "sorry, we are encountering technical issue" after couple seconds of hesitation. That put me in concern, there is no part of the world will use this kind of ambigious/bureacratic response if there is nothing majorly wrong. Then we immediately realized not only customers are kicked out of store, but its own employees......THIS IS NOT GOOD!

Rushed to garage, summoned our driver and ftimmediately. On the way out, we realized not only the big bazaar but the whole mall is shutting down. Luckly, we got out of therebefore the traffic go too bad. Still, due to language, we still not exactly figured out what was going on.

second day, my colleague forwarded me this.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/32/20081006/1053/tnl-bomb-scare-at-gurgaon-mall.html

Woops !!! Haha..... luckly nothing happened. Another special and interesting india experience. Need to be a cunny shopper here at any time.

Chokhi Dhani @ Jaipur

The small theme park and resort is based on Rajasthani style.

I personally like it since it is a good place for a entry level foreigners. The snakes are all good.. some fun activites that kids can do and enjoy.
Post a funny and nice video here.



Manual ferry wheel!!!