I’m currently in Valparai, Tamil Nadu doing some work with the Nature Conservation Foundation folks. Lot of events this week, which I shall write about later. Few weeks ago, an old lady was injured from what was reported as an attack by a leopard in this town. There was no conclusive evidence, but the forest department was pressurized to setup Leopard traps outside the town to catch this Leopard. Valparai is surrounded by Tea estates and forest fragments and leopard sightings are quite common. Anyway this morning we got a call that a leopard was caught in one of the…

After living off borrowed laptops and desktops for a month, I’m finally back online. I’ve given my Thinkpad for servicing at a nearby computer place who said he would be able to fix it for Rs 10k, but I’m still waiting on it. Meanwhile, I decided to switch and moved to Mac. Its been exactly a decade since I switched from Win 98 to Linux and now moving to Mac has been quite an interesting transition. I just managed to get all the things running in the mac and since I do a lot of photo editing, I think I’m…

I had made a quick trip up to North Karnataka for few days last week. On the 1st day of the trip, my laptop (Thinkpad T41p) screen flickered for a bit and after that just refused to boot up. I got back and gave it to the IBM service center for repair and have been keeping my fingers crossed as I just ran out of the 3 year warranty period. Today they get back to me and say the motherboard is busted and they will charge me Rs 50,000 ($1200) for replacing it. Thats right, almost the cost of a…

Finally its documentary over (Atleast the filming bit). The edit is scheduled in April and hopefully the documentary will air sometime towards the end of the year. The final shoot was quite tough. Had to walk up and down Eravikulam National park with all the heavy gear on my back. Sometimes I ended up walking more than 35 KM a day. The night temperates touched sub zero (Never imagined I would experience -6 C in south india) and the days were hot and sweaty. Also finally managed to climb up Anai Mudi, the tallest peak south of Himalayas. The view…

Heading out now on my final filming schedule for the Western Ghats documentary. Our last shoot is at Eravikulam again and we are all back at the end of the month. Its going to be freaking cold up there at this time of the year. I’ve still not had time to process all my Namdapha trip photos. Promise to post them all as soon as I get back.

Happy New Year Folks I spent the new years Scuba diving near Goa and it ROCKED. What did you do ?

Yuthi is one of the young chaps from the Lisu tribe who was with us on our trip at Namdapha. He was helping us carry our luggage as we crossed the National park in over 10 days. The other Lisu men used to call him ‘Superman’ because he was the strongest one of the lot. He was also the happiest of the lot because on Dec 14th (today) was his wedding and he was really excited about that. On the 4th day of our trip he fell ill and we decided to let him rest at the ’52 mile’ settlement…

OK, so I’m all set to go on the largest adventure/expedition of my life. Got all my medications, all my gear packed up and hopefully my camera will last till the end of the trip. If time permits, hope to swing via Kaziranga on the way out. See ya all in 3 weeks time.

The expedition is 2 weeks long and I do not have access to any source of electricity along the way. I tried the AA battery pack for my D200 and D70, but they hardly last. I tried bunch of solar options, but either the gear is too heavy or not powerful enough to charge these batteries. So I need to pack up as much juice for my camera as possible. If any of you have a spare Nikon D200/D80/D70/D50 battery, I’d really appreciate it if you can let me borrow it for 3 weeks.

I guess I went through a writers block the last month or so. I thought I’d mention this before I disappear this weekend. I’m heading out on a 3 week vacation to Namdapha tiger reserve in Arunachal Pradesh. Namdapha has been my dream for many years and after months of planning, the trip is finally happening. Namdapha is the only place in the world which supports 4 big cat species – Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and the Clouded Leopard. Also on the trip are some of the amazing scientists from NCF. The plan is to start from Miao and trek…