Posts by: Kalyan Varma

If any of you want to work as a Naturalist with one of the best wildlife company in India, then drop me a mail. Sarath, who was the one who offered me a job as a naturalist is looking for people for his new company Taj Safaris which is working in partnership with CC Africa. I have seen what they do, and sometimes I myself still get tempted to go there and join as a Naturalist. The pay is very decent, no previous wildlife experience needed ( just some interest as they will do the training) and some of the…

The Shola forests are like sponges. They store all the water during the monsoon and slowly squeeze it out rest of the year. This is the reason why the sholas have such thick density of plant life and are always humid and moist. Eravikulam National park has lot of streams originating from many of these sholas. The photos below is the stream closest to the hut.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the most striking thing about Eravikulam was the Landscape. The core area looks totally different from the tourism zone (Rajmalai), where 99.9% of the tourists land up. Most of the national park is about 2000 meters elevation, so most of the time, the peaks are above the clouds (hence called cloud forests). During winters, the temperature drops below freezing and even when I was there last week, the night temperatures were approaching close to freezing. I missed most of the morning golden light shots as it was just too cold to wake up…

If I could describe Eravikulam National Park in one single word then it would be Desert Massive open grasslands, immense spaces and an eerie silence. So quite, I was whispering most of the time and the silence is only broken at times by the wind or some small birds. The temperatures drop close to freezing point in the nights and it can get quite hot in the mornings. Since you have to walk for everything, your whole perspective of things change. I was walking between 15 to 35 km daily along with my gear. I lost 4 KG and my…

Starting tomorrow, I’m off again to Eravikulam National Park. This time however, I’m going into the core area with all the gear and I will mostly be there for about 10 days at least. There is one small issue though. I’m staying in an old hut which is at least 18km from the nearest human contact. No roads, no power, no connectivity. The hut is at least few hours trek through tough terrain to get to. So I’m hiring some 10 porters to carry all the gear and few weeks worth of supplies along. Taking a custom rigged solar charger…..

This news has been long time pending. For the next few months, I’m working on a BBC assignment with Sandesh on a wildlife documentary about the western ghats. Its a part research and part documentary project and the whole thing is being shot in pure HighDef video. The research bit is the search for some of the rare, extinct and maybe mythical creatures of the western ghats. Ofcourse I’ll still be lugging around my digital camera around with the video cameras. The last few weeks has been hectic as we were busy with pre-production – getting all the permits in…

My Blog has been nominated for the Best Indian Travel blog and Best Photoblog (thought I’ve hardly been posting any new photographs) over at Indibloggies. So if you have some spare time, head over to Indibloggies and Vote.

May you soul rest in peace. You did not deserve it and you will never be forgotten.

I spent the last 2 days at Honnemarudu, a large water resevoir on Linganmakki back waters close to Sagar, shimoga. The highlight of the trip was this : We reached there pretty late and somewhere at 8pm, we decided to camp in one of the uninhabited islands. We threw our bags onto a boat and half way through the ride, we decided to jump in the water. The water was warm, there was not a single source of light in sight and the moon had not come in yet. So one could see every star in the sky including the…

Google video just launced a recommendations feature that suggests videos based on your search history, ratings and viewing patterns. Top on the list for me was this video of Canon Shutter sounds ranging from Canon 1DS MARK II to the 350D. If you are a camera gear junkie like me, then you will enjoy this video.