Visit to Top Slip, Annamalai Hills

Recently, I visited this place called Top Slip in the Annamalai Hills, Tamil Nadu. My parents had come on some work to Coimbatore so I started from Bangalore to meet up with them. By the way, if you plan to halt at Coimbatore, I recommend the Perur Shiva Temple and the cross-cut road for some shopping. My mom was so excited to find sarees available at half of the price that you usually pay in big cities like Bangalore or Hyderabad.

From Coimbatore, we booked an a/c Indica to go to Top slip via Pollachi. From Coimbatore to Pollachi, the road is straight but from Pollachi its a ghat road; top slip is about 750 m above sea level. Another thing to remember is -avoid going to top slip in the monsoon season.
We started in the morning at around 9.30 and we reached top slip in the afternoon. There we stayed in a forest guest house. The scenery all around was that of green and brown. Infact, I was amazed to see boars and spotted deer roaming in the rolling greens and a chloropsis and lorikeets on a tree just in front of our guest house. I immediately thought to myself that this is going to be another amazing holiday trip !

We finished our lunch, took some rest and after a while just started walking on the path that led us into the forest behind our guest house with a couple of binoculars for some bird watching. Luckily we spotted quite a bit of activity near some trees hardly after walking for 100 m...and I was so thrilled to see a variety of birds. In fact it was the first time a saw such a congregation of different kind of birds at one place. We were later told that it is very unsafe to travel on foot alone as wild elephants roam freely in that region and hence give the hills their name (Aana -elephant, Malai -hills).

In the early evening, we boarded a forest department's bus that took us to the elephant training camp and on the way spotted a barking dear foraging hardly a few metres away from our bus. Again I was very excited to see so many elephants in a natural setting. We were told that the local tribes were well known for their ability to train the elephants and that they made excellent mahouts.

We returned back to the guest house and relaxed for sometime and later headed back into the forest for a night safari. We went in a jeep along with a two man team comprising of the driver and a forest guard, who was equipped with a powerful searchlight. As the driver slowly rode along, the guard would throw the light around to spot any animals. My dad explained to me that they use a clever trick to spot animals easily using this method- As the light is shown, the animal if present in the line of the beam, would turn to see the light. The person sitting behind the search light would then suddenly see a pair of eyes lighted up like radium stickers.

With the help of the search light we were able to spot bisons, sambhars and even a mouse deer, which is extremely difficult to spot. We were hoping to spot a predator but were not that lucky this time. But overall it was an excellent experience, I mean going out into the jungle in the night and getting a chance to observe animals like bisons at such close quarters.

The next morning, we started our journey back to Coimbatore. Again we were greeted by a few birds like a rocket-tailed drongo (that was making some really interesting calls), crow pheasant, some bee catchers and a group of highly endangered lion tailed macaques swinging from one tree onto another.

Some more aerial footage

After may be a year or more, I was able to fly my RC airplane again. I fitted the plane with a Flycamone2 camera and got some nice footage...check it out :

Beware of this dangerous website !

Many of you may be knowing about it already...and yet ...I must mention about this awesome online book selling shop called www.flipkart.com for the benefit of others who do not know about it.

Firstly, it is an Indian site which is very professional. For many popular books, the site promises to deliver in 3-4 days ! and they keep their promise too. Foreign books can be procured in 3-4 weeks time. Secondly no shipping charges whatso ever ! Thirdly the price of the book is usually lesser than that of other bookshops like landmark or odyssey, etc. Infact for some books you can get upto 25% or more discount ! Fourthly, there are tons of options for paying the bill..they even have a cash on delivery method !

Many times convenience and cost do not go together but not this time. With all the above mentioned features, this website is a must for all book lovers. In the last few weeks I must have ordered 10 books already ! Strangely, I can't seem to get out of this weird habit...so watch out for this site.

Horse riding in B'lore?

During the winter vacation, I got a chance to learn a bit of horse riding along with some friends in Visakhapatnam and it was a great experience that I enjoyed very much.
So hoping to continue this new hobby in Bangalore as well, I looked on the web for some information. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of horse riding schools here. I decided to check out one of them along with my friend namely, the Equestrian Centre of Excellence, NRA Grounds, Jayamahal Road.

The centre has a reasonably big stable with about 25 or so horses. A few horses that we got to saw were quite healthy and big (please don't ask me the breed or the race of the horses). The fee is Rs. 3500 for ten classes each lasting 45 min. This is not too bad a deal; but I wish the they had more place to ride the horse. They have only got a 200-250 m circular ground to practice riding.
Once, you have mastered the basics there is an area where you may learn jumping with your horse or learn to play polo.
We didn't want to directly register for the 10 classes, so we asked for a single session. For this, we were charged Rs. 400 for about 45 min. Also, the instructor, who said he was an ex-army man, was quite enthusiastic in giving us some tips and techniques.
Follow this link for more pictures of the club. This weekend I am planning to check out another horse riding club near the turf club. Untill then happy riding !

Winter vacation-trip to Orissa

Happy new year ! This is my first blog for this year and I am excited. Okay enough of this gay banter...let me get to the point.

This christmas vacation was great, especially the trip that I took with my parents to Orissa. We booked a Qualis for the road trip. The first leg of our journey was from Visakhapatnam to Bhuvaneshwar, which served as a base camp so to say. The second day, we went to Puri via Pipli to visit the beautiful and magnificient Jagannath temple. Winter is a good season for tourists so the temple was reasonably crowded. We then went to a place called Satpada, where there is the Chilka Development Authority's knowledge center. We arrived late, so we quickly explored the knowledge center and proceeded into the lake on a boat to catch a glimpse of the Irrawady dolphins. Unfortunately it got a bit dark but we did manage to spot the dolphins as they came up to the surface to catch a breath. It was a thrilling experience to see dolphins in such close quarters and in its natural environment.
We then proceeded back to Bhuvaneshwar for the night halt. The next day we started off to Konark. Boy o Boy, the famed temple of Konark is a huge structure with intricate and beautiful sculpture. We took a lot pictures and spent quite a bit of time exploring the temple. After this, we headed to a place called Barkul which is on the shores of the Chilka Lagoon.
We halted there for the night and woke up early in the morning to visit a couple of temples in Barkul. The Prajapati temple is a beautiful temple that resembled the Puri Jagannath temple albeit scaled down. It was then time to take a boat to explore the lake and visit the world-famous bird sanctuary deep inside the lagoon. After travelling about an hour or so on the motor boat (not speed boat), we reached the bird sanctuary (you need special permission, which is quite hard to get, to go into the sanctuary).
Immediately as we entered the sanctuary, the setting of the scene changed quite suddenly. Different kinds of wetland birds surrounded us in all directions. We slowed down and went to the watch tower where we were greeted by a bunch of forest officials who were eager to receive us. Luckily for us, they had recently installed a telescope on the tower (courtesy some VIP) and we were overwhelmed by the sight of rare, endangered and beautiful birds like flamingoes, aucets, etc which were busy feeding at a great distance and in such huge numbers (in thousands !). The one hour or so stay in the bird sanctuary was just an amazing and unforgettable experience. It is one thing to see these birds on the television, but it is wholly different thing to be in that surroundings. It seemed like we had been magically transported to a different world, the world of birds, where we completely forgot about everything else and just enjoyed the experience.
All good things come to an end and so did our visit to the bird sanctuary. Sadly we took the boat back to the shores and later returned to Visakhapatnam. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip and felt sad that it ended so quickly. I highly recomment this trip to anybody...infact I was very surprised to learn from our car driver that this route is not frequented by people from Andhra Pradesh despite the obvious attractions such as the glorious temples of Puri, Konark and the chance to relax in the arms of nature (Satpada, Chilka, etc.)
Anyways more pictures of the trip can be found here.

Easycub and autopilot : Part 1

I had mentioned earlier that I have been working on making an autopilot for my radio controlled airplane, Multiplex Easycub. The aim of the autopilot is of course to make the airplane to fly through a given set of waypoints autonomously without any pilot intervention.
There are readily available autopilot modules like papparazi, ardupilot, etc. However me and and my friend, Yogesh set out to build one ourselves.

Some progress has been made recently in this direction. Before implementing the autopilot using Arduino I thought "Why not simulate the flight dynamics first in order to better understand the effects of the flight control system logic". It would also be a very nice project in itself i.e.flight dynamic simulation of an RC airplane.

I decided that I would use Matlab's simulink to avoid any coding and to shorten the time required for development. The aerospace blockset in simulink has 3DOF and 6DOF blocks for flight simulation. I used the 3DOF block (X, Z & Pitch) instead of the 6DOF block to make things a little easier in the beginning.
The blockset needs the aerodynamic forces in the X, Z (body axes) and moment in the Y direction (body axes).

Yogi suggested an excellent software for obtaining the aerodynamic coefficients: Datcom-Holycows. After going through the datcom manual and other help files, I prepared a .dcm file that contains flight point and geometry details of the easycub. On execution of this input file, I obtained a .out and .ac files among other outputs. The .ac file is for visualization while the .out file contains the aerodynamic coefficients. After playing around with the values, I finally settled down on a geometry which I felt was a close match to the easycub model.

If you are too lazy to setup the .dcm file yourself, you can use mine (you may need to join yahoo's digital_datcom group before you can access the file).

Looking for a shop in Bangalore to buy a guitar?

Hi again,

Recently my resolution to learn a musical instrument hardened and I purchased a guitar last week.
After searching on the web for some time, I found that there were a few stores in Bangalore where I could purchase a guitar.
I decided to check out one such store called Aruna Musicals in Koramangala (one of my friends also suggested this place). The store is well stocked with a variety of musical instruments and the staff is reasonably friendly and willing to help a beginner like me in choosing a decent guitar. I initially allocated about Rs 2500 for the guitar. They had something at that price but on second thought I went for a more expensive one; a gb&a acoustic guitar for Rs. 3600 + Rs 400 (for the cover).

Anyways, I recommend this store to anybody wishing to buy a musical instrument.