Burning Electrons

and soon at Picasa (I like the association with maps on Picasa). I’ve gone through the catalog of passable pictures and re-massaged them with Curves and crops so they concentrate more on the places that we visited. Not that you can tell where we were, but I decided that I spent too much time concentrating on faces and didn’t spend enough time on the physical surroundings that we found ourselves in.

While I was reevaluting the images, I found a lot of shots of the Taj Mahal.  Thats the building (right), not the singer (left).  That must be the most photographed building in the world.  Part of the reason there are so many is that I finally hit a spot in the golden hour when the sun was shining.  I hadn’t had that opportunity anywhere else during our travels.  Or at least, this was the first time that I was at a photogenic site when the conditions were right.

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I’m starting to get excited about this trip to India.  I leave in one month, 30 days. Do I have everything ready to go?  Well, I’ve got my tickets ready, I’ve got my passport and visa, I’ve paid for the tour (the Tricycle Journal’s In the Footsteps of the Buddha Pilgrimage),  booked an extra days lodging at a Tibetan Buddhist run Guest house in Delhi, and I’ve got my luggage ready, I’ve even done a dry run on packing to see if what I plan to take will fit into the bags I am taking.  I’ve got this real nifty camera bag and its even all packed, although I haven’t managed to find a decent tripod to take with me.  I figure I’ll take a small tripod and a monopod and hope that will make do.  I’ve never prepacked anything before, not sure why I did this time, probably just because I was ready to go about 3 weeks ago. I’m also looking forward to the end of my trip because I plan to spend a week in South Africa, near Knysna, visiting with a friends parents, sitting on a cliff above the souther Ocean, watching the waves and relaxing.

It turns out that this is the year that the Kumbe Mella (not sure how y0u spell that, but that’s how it sounds).  That is the biggest spiritual festival held anywhere, I think.  Apparently, as one of the Hindu gods was ascending into the heavens, four drops of water spilled from his cup and landed on earth in the 4 different places in India where this festival is held.  4 years ago there were reportedly 30 million attendees at the last celebration.  A movie was made of that festival called Fasttrack to Nirvana or something like that.  All the yogi’s and yogini’s and guru’s and every other sort of mystic shows up there.  Heavy on the Vedantic influences, but its something that I would like to go to once before I am done traveling.  I even thought about extending my trip 10 days to go this time, but then I figured that that might be overkill, and that I could better use the time to visit with Chris and Madeleine at Knysna.  They were so nice the last time I was there, when they were still at Francoise’s house in Oobos, when they let me sit on the porch and relax.  I was not in very good shape when I was traveling with Murray and Paul, two guys in their 20′s. They were into partying and I was into kicking back.  Luckily I could take the bus back to Oobos and hang out there and reschedule my flights out of George SA instead of having to go all the way to JoBurg.

So this is the first installment of my journal about this trip.  Hopefully I will get back into writing  a decent narrative on this trip to India and South Africa as it is at least unique in its two destinations.

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