India Travel Blog has seen 100,000 visitors and 200,000 page views in last 14 months. It feels like a good milestone, but nevertheless only reminds me that I am long way to go.
I have a few ambitious plans to go with India Travel Blog. A year down the line, I hope to quit from my full time job and spend a lot of time travelling, writing content on this blog and elsewhere that could help fellow travelers and also let me make a living out of it. It sounds like an ambitious idea, and I think it really is one. To make travel writing to sustain my living and travelling, I need to add a lot more content here and also ensure that I have lot more visitors coming in.
Although I don’t have completely concrete ideas, primary source of revenue then would be advertisements on this site. It would be supplemented by writing to travel magazines and may be by some travel related consulting if and where possible. If all this happens, I would naturally travel more than I now do, and hence update this blog with more content, making it a sustainable system.
It is a long way to go for this to happen, and traffic and income from this blog has to grow around ten times more than it now is, to reach the figures I have in mind. Of course, it is a difficult job and I have lot of work to do. And with so many travel sites mushrooming in the last few years, the job only gets tougher. My current plan is to exit from day-job at the end of this calendar year and set myself free. Time alone can tell if everything works as planned.
Freeing myself up doesn’t mean that I will be on the road most of the time. I know anything overdone can make you disinterested and also drain all the energy. Instead, I would travel on and off, but take more time to savor each place when I visit them. When I took off from work and travelled a lot last year, I understood that it is important to do it slowly and experience each place to its fullest. And when I am not travelling, I hope to spend my time doing all those things that I have intended to do but never been able to because of compulsions of a day-job. That includes, among a lot more things, to work for a good cause that could benefit a few people, to learn some musical instruments, read plenty of books that I have always wanted to read, go to dance classes, learn Spanish, horse riding, improve my swimming skills, go diving, learn to cook better and more variety of dishes, write useful software snippets for photographers and web designers and distribute them for free or a small fee. These are just a tip of the pile of things that I would love to do but haven’t been doing. And because I might get a chance to do all these things if I can exit from my 9 to 5 schedule, it is important to me that my plans succeed. Of course, I hope I will be useful to many travellers who look for information if I manage to grow this blog. And your support and feedbacks are important to me in making my plans work. Wish me for good, and do be with me in these efforts.
Travelling in the North-East in the summer of 2006
Guwahati >> Eaglenest >> Tawang >> Nameri >> Kaziranga >> Shillong >> Cherrapunjee
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My fellow travellers started arriving later in the day. We all met in the hotel lobby, got to know each other and quickly went on with long conversations on birds, Eaglenest and other things we had in our mind for the journey into Arunachal Pradesh.
Our team was in interesting assortment of people. We had a management consultant who worked in the retail industry, a writer who write children’s books, two students of post graduation in biodiversity, two software engineers, an officer in the Indian Forest Service, a beautician and a nomadic traveler(me!). Come to think of it, if it was a gathering of 10 people somewhere in southern parts of India, it would most likely have been 10 guys from the IT industry! Conservation and keen interest in birds and nature was the only thing we had in common that brought us together. It made us at home with each other and we quickly made friends and gelled well with each other.
A bridge near Doimari village in Arunachal where we stopped for a short break. Note the thick forest all around
Some of us in the team were very keen to be of use in saving nature. One of the members spent a lot of her spare time working for ‘Kids for Tigers‘. The writer in the group spent a lot of time writing books to create awareness about environment in children and the IFS officer was leading conservation efforts in Kanchenjunga National Park. I was in great company and I knew that my days in Eaglenest are going to be spent doing something worthy.
We were up and ready to leave at 5am next morning and took a comfortable bus to Tezpur. It broke down after an hour of journey and we had to wait for a spare bus to arrive. Our enthusiastic birding group smelled opportunity in this too and were quickly out with their binocs and bird-books in the lookout for new birds in this unfamiliar region. Further, we stopped again at Nagaon for breakfast and reached Tezpur around 12pm.
There was a jeep waiting in Tezpur to take us through rest of the journey to our camp in Eaglenest. We drove through hot and humid planes via Missamari village in Assam and Doimari in Arunachal. We frequently stopped to sight and hear new birds we had never seen earlier, like the Lesser Adjutant Storks, Grey Backed Shrike and many more. The road started climbing as soon as we left Assam and crossed Arunachal border. Empty and barren stretches of Assam gave way to thick, impenetrable and undisturbed evergreen forests.
We drove till evening in thick forest with our narrow road bisecting the forest. The village of Doimari with a small population and a forest checkpost were the only places where we encountered signs of human presence. We continued to stop for seeing wildlife and were rewarded with sightings of Capped Langur, Khaleej Pheasant, Pied-Hornbill, etc.. We also passed a month old carcass of a huge decaying elephant which had slipped down a slide and died.
It was much after sunset when we reached our campsite. We were all tired after an entire day’s journey and were glad to have finally made it. After a simple and filling dinner, we crashed in the camp looking forward to the next day.
To be continued…
Author: Stephen Alter
Publishers: Penguin Books
Pages: 327
Unlike what it’s title seems to indicate, Elephas Maximus is no science book for the students of biology, but a book for every one who has slightest interest in Indian Elephants, or Asian Elephants to precise. Stephen Alter has done considerable research on every aspects of the elephants in India and has presented it well enough to attract readers of every kind. In his own words –
In this book, I have tried to tell elephant’s story in India through myth, art and literature, as well as something of its biology and natural history.
He travels all through the country in search of the elephants and visits them in the wilderness of National Parks, in temples in captivity, in breeding centers of state forest departments and anywhere else elephants might exist as myth or reality. He writes about their biology and natural history, besides covering cultural aspects of their relationship with man, historical status and position of elephants in India and also man-animal conflict. Alter also ponders on Ganesha, the elephant faced Hindu god. He digs through the ancient scriptures of Gajasutra and Kalidasa’s Meghadoota to discover the role and status of elephants in the history of our society.
The emotional aspect of relationship between man and pachyderm is given considerable importance and is one of the highlights of the book. He writes about Mahouts who love their elephants and remain sensitive to the needs of the giant, about conservation efforts in India, and caring for the elephants. The pains of capturing elephants by Khedda and other measures in the past have been well elaborated.
Also notable are his coverage of elephants at various locations all over India, including Mysore, Guruvayur temple, Sonepur Mela, Mudumalai elephant camp, Corbett and Rajaji National Parks, Kabini and Kaziranga.
The contents of the book are well organized, has a good flow and makes a good reading for those with even the slightest interest on pachyderms.