Postcards from Pondy

Pondicherry is a beach town with a town beach and where you get a beach in a town you get couples getting a bit of private time and an ice cream seller ready to be woken and sell his wares.

A lighthouse and blue skies on the promenade.  The weather was hot and dry as the monsoon starts about a month later than in Mumbai.

The street dogs look as though they're having a good laugh at something but are just panting to keep cool,  I could relate.

I enjoyed Pondy, it has a laid back atmosphere and yes, I could see the French influence and cross pollination from other parts of the Inochine empire.  There was good food and coffee and friendly people and cheap wine too.

There are more pictures to come but I'm working on a dongle at the moment and subsequently slowed down so it'll be little and often on the blog for a wee while longer.

Beach time

I wasn't sure about how I would take to Goa. For sure I was up for a bit of in-your-face tourism with all the cocktails, beach loungers and eating places geared to the international beach bum. I wasn't too keen on the by product of all that, lots and lots of other people looking for the same thing but as it turned out I struck lucky. A guesthouse backing onto a busy beach at a part of the beach that wasn't too busy so if I angled my book right the place looked almost deserted.

I had a hammock at my beck and call

Visitors were few and very cute

Beach vendors were photogenic and not not too pushy


with just the right amount of creative framing the beach looked lovely

I've just realised, I didn't have one cocktail! Just as well I'm going back to explore another part of Goa in a week.

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur

Jai Singh's amazing stone astronomical observatory built in the early 18th Century and a perfect blue sky.

BBC Radio 4 did an excellent programme on this place if you want to find out more about it. In Our Time, Jantar Mantar.

Mumbai mixture

There's no theme to this post, just a collection of pictures taken recently. I've got over whingeing about grey skies and poor light and decided just to suck it up and take pictures anyway. No more excuses accepted, it's going to be like this for about half the year so I just need to adapt.

Repainting the Taj hotel tower, one little bit at a time.





Family outing Marine Drive, overexposed but I like how the family group are thrown into isolation against the mainly white background.

I was attracted by the vibrant orange, the only good thing about grey light is that bright colours are more eycatching.



This came out a bit softer than I hoped for and I'm quite shy about taking pictures of strangers so I didn't hang about to correct my mistakes. I like his face anyway and that there's a "big balloon" in the background.

Clever camera tricks

Some people, not me, are very good with photo manipulation tools. Here's a photograph I took back in 2008 at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

Below is something created using it by a Flickr member called Jeloid (click the name for the original work in a larger size)



Pretty impressive huh? I think I'll stick to the odd crop and fiddling about with lighting in photoshop when things turn out really bad, if only because I have neither the skills nor the time to develop them.

Happy New Year

Last night we climbed onto our roof via the chrome spiral staircase mentioned in earlier posts to watch the firework displays along the river. Very spectacular, and today we ventured uptown to take advantage of quiet, by Saigon standards, roads and join the promenade up and down Nguyen Hue.

The entire four lane road has been blocked off and planting extends from the central reservations right out onto the roads.

As always the main attraction is posing in front of displays for photo opportunities and as always I sneak up and take pictures of other people taking pictures. This trio is outside the Kinh Do Conference Centre. Kinh Do is the confectionary king of HCMC.

Of course it's year of the Ox so we have lots of bulls to see, these ones are cunningly formed in concrete and lack certain features only noticeable from behind. You're getting the front view as it's more attractive.

More posing, but this time look carefully. You see the security person in the background? He has two jobs; to make sure people keep to the one way system - very successfully done and to stop people sitting on the temporary walls. The latter is not so well enforced, they tend to give people enough time to snap the all important picture before very politely requesting them to move on.

Clearly it's an exhausting job.

All this was played out to a background of recorded birdsong and latin classics. I like Tet!