Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park

We had a trip to Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park during weekend of 26 April. What a trip. I had a vague idea of what the Sequoias would be like having seen the Muir woods forest near San Francisco but the sequoias in these national park are much taller compared to the Redwoods in the muir woods. Here are some numbers:

1) Largest tree in the world (by Volume): The General Sherman: 275 ft, ...
2) One of the widest tree in the world : The Grant Sequoia 40 ft wide


















Besides the talls trees which are seen in both forest, there is also a high probability of spotting some wild life, yes we did see it. We spotted two baby bears, a wood pecker, some wild cats, a wild lizard and also some other birds I don't know the names of.







The oneway journey is approx 5 hrs and you have to drive quite a bit inside the parks so though the earlier plan was to get back the same day by afternoon I was pretty sure I can't drive back all the way, as we kept seeing various points and did some trails we also figured out that the sequoia park itself takes one full day to have a good tour and then the kings canyon would need another full day, we cud only complete the tour by Sunday evening 7 PM (instead of earlier plan of leaving for Mountain View by Saturday 9 PM or so :P). Lodging was at the Snowline lodge on the way to Fresno, If you are prepared with camping equipments however you may easily find other places to stay for e.g YMCA or some camps in either of the parks.


Lots of beautiful spots and nice trails, waterfalls, lakes and awesome views of mountain ranges besides the big tall trees which were there at all places, is the best way to describe the place. I hope the photos speak themselves.

Weekend trips, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Point Reyes, Uvas Canyon

A short post about the four weekend trips:

Santa Cruz: Just 40 minutes away from Mountain View, SC offers a beautiful ride along the coast and a whole lots of beaches to stop by and the most important of these is the Santa Cruz beach broadwalk, an amusement park next to the main beach where you get to pay per ride, which makes it good to visit any point of day.

Monterey: Is another such place to go along specially famous for its 17 miles drive which is one of the things in my list of must not miss things. Monterey also includes a set of famous beaches including the Carmel beach and the Pebble beach. This time we tried dinning at the "Indian Summers" restaurant in the downtown, which was pretty good in ambiance and taste too except for the spicy level being very high (4/5 was too high, yes he asks you how much spicy on a scale of 0 to 5 and we over estimated ourselves :D).

Point Reyes National Seashore: Its another national park close to the SF and just ~1.5 hrs of drive. We started at around 4PM and it turned out to be not so great trip as by the time we reached it was already dark, cudn't see much of the place but just a beach which was pretty good though. The other group which reached some time earlier also missed the sunset (which seems to be pretty famous) but cud spend lot of time on the beach and also cud see the lighthouse.

Uvas Canyon State Park: This is a close by hiking trail close to San Hose. The only strong reason we had for going there was the Waterfalls section of the San Francisco and Bay area travel guide enlisting it. Turned out to be pretty good trekking experience with almost 4 miles overall walk.







[Photos only of Uvas canyon will upload others later]

Shasta : The Lesser known Tahoe Alternative

Last weekend three of us, Mayank, Roshan and I had a trip to Shasta. Its been another awesome trip, thanks to Nishit and Subeer for telling us about this place.



My usual wikitravel search wasn't very helpful in informing what this place offered, but a 5 minutes of browsing first few results on Google helped. The place offers among other things: Ice Skating (Shasta Ice Ring at Siskiyou county), Skiing (country-side and downhill at Mount Shasta), Snow mobiles (The Fun Factory at Deer mountain) besides the scenic Lakes including the Shasta lake, very scenic drives along the mountain with the view of Shasta mountain covered by snow. The Caverns at the Shasta lake weren't open when we reached but seems to be another major attraction here.



The places seems to be much lesser known than Tahoe, may be because of a longer distance from Mountain View, the drive is around 5 hrs without break. Reaching late afternoon on the Saturday turned out to be a bad decision as we felt a time crunch when we collected the pamphlets and brochures from the Visitor info desk. Ultimately we decided to just drive around and see some of the famous points driving along the Mountain Highway. After the first few points we were to witness road blocked due to snow fall. We then drove to Siskiyou lake and it was already dark when we returned. Took accomodation at the Filindia motel which was pretty decent for the price.



Our car after an overnite parking
The next day, we were decided to do skiing the first thing. As we were heading to the Ski park on the road we saw another ski trainer/rentals group. This group offers the Lessons and Full day pass for just 40 bucks. Which seemed much less compared to Tahoe. Soon I did realize that the equipments and gear were not exactly the same as my last ski experience. Turns out we selected country-side skiing this time and it was Downhill skiing last time (Gosh I didn't know there were two types :)). I would recommend ppl to try both kinds of skiing as they are very different experiences (In one you keep working all the time to go forward and in other you keep breaking the speed that you are automatically getting due to slope).

[Adventure sports picks are to be put up soon]

Then we went for Snow Mobiles, thanks to the people whom we saw doing this a day before and asked for details. The snow mobiles thing happens at around 40 miles distance from the ski park place and road you got to take goes around the Shasta mountain to almost 360 degrees providing a great view all along. Snowmobiles are rented by the Fun Factory group. Again this whole thing looked like a decent deal with just 50 bucks plus fuel charges per hour. Snowmobiles are pretty different from Jet skis, in the fact that they are pretty heavy and don't have such smooth steering, but they can go pretty fast and are indeed a great adventure sport.

On the return journey we tried the caverns which were closed and then visited the Shasta dam the second largest in the US. To me it didn't look like anything that is worth spending time on.
Lake Shasta from Shasta Dam
Tips:
1) At this point of year the temperature was seeing a low of 18 F in the morning, so early morning adventure may be difficult. The snowmobile ppl asked us to turn up after 10 AM.
2) Though country-side skiing mostly doesn't hurt much on falling, its always good idea to put on extra clothes and pads to avoid any injury and also the cold.
3) This place deserves lot of time, we cud have spent another day very easily if we had it.
4) Caverns tour close pretty early like 2 or 4 PM depending on time of year, so plan out properly.

Another trip to Los Angeles

A mail sent to the group asking for what should be the weekend plan and 10 hrs later we are planning about our LA trip, to make things more interesting after a nice offsite at IFly at SF in the morning with the team and a decent dance party on the Friday evening, at 00:30 hrs after lot of rethinking the plan is finalized and it is to leave at 2:30 AM :)




Lot of sleep deprivation sounded like a bad idea for me but was against the opinion of everyone else so I decided to comply. Shreyas and I were supposed to share the drive of around 359 miles. Giving around 3 hrs per head (Yeah the average sucks because there are road which you drive at 85 MPH and others where 65 MPH is difficult). The journey in the night seemed to be easier then the day one with much less traffic, I would say an ideal time for someone to venture driving in to Freeways as Mayank did.

The journey went easier than imagined we were in Santa Monica by around 8:30 AM and within few minutes at Gundu's appartment and then continued to Universal Studios, Los Angeles spending around 90 minutes to reach the place due to traffic (fortunately not too many jams on our side). Universal Studios was certainly not my choice as I have been there already but certainly something one won't miss on their first trip. The second visit didn't turn out to be too interesting for me but others enjoyed it as much as I did on my previous visit. This time the waiting time was ~10-15 minutes for each ride compared to around 1 hr on prev visit seeming because that was a long weekend. The 7-8 hrs of time spent was enough for the covering almost everything. Universal Studios closes at 8 PM and post that you are mostly left to roam around in the shopping area around.

Our earlier plans were to visit San Diego next day but Gundu informed us about the fact that it would probably take 2 full days for a good SD visit and we decided to stick to places in Santa Monica and LA, covering the Venice and Santa Monica beaches followed by Mullholand drive watching the famous Hollywood sign and finally taking loads of photos there. The evening was spent on the Hollywood walk of fame (which turned out to be just a footpath :)) and other nearby entertainment after which we decided to watch the sunrise from Griffith Park. Griffith park turned out to be a very big location and we could only figure out the right point after the sunset :P. But we ended up reaching the Observatory which offers one of the best view of the LA city in the evening. The observatory had lot of other stuff like planetarium and some informative gallery but we had to run back and leave back for Mountain View. The drive was another night drive and took us around 7 hrs again though it was from a different path and much more curvy road.

Bike trip to Sri Sailem

The weekend of 26th-27th Jan, 34 of us bikers rode to Sri Sailem on 19 bikes. I only decided for joining the trip around 11:30 PM on the Friday evening, and went ahead for filling Petrol and getting a friends' camera, Its was around 1 AM :). We were supposed to gather at the venue (Shoppers' stop) at around 4:30 AM and to leave at 5:00 AM. The idea of sleeping for just around 3 hrs before going for a long ride was pretty scary but, decision was already made :)

Somehow I left for the meeting point at around 4:45 AM from my home. The distance of around 20 KMs for which I had around 15 minutes. I was pretty much wondering if I could catch up the group etc (I had to fill more Petrol on the way too as I didn't get Extra Premium one the previous night ). Somehow I finally reached the spot at around 5:05 or so and to my relief there were only half the ppl there still. We could only finally start by around 6:00 AM.




The distance to Sri Sailem is around 250 KM (actual Milo Meter reading difference) and it started off pretty well with Ram leading the group as he has been there earlier too. After riding for around 4 KM at Panjagutta Circle we had a stop. This was very unexpected. While we pondered why we stopped at that point, someone informed a few bikers already lost the way. Most of us could only LOL on the situation and imagining what lie ahead :D



Then we moved on, Charminar was on the way and it looked amazingly beautiful under the lights. A photo should say more. Soon we were out of city limits and on a good and smooth road. The next major stop was only for breakfast and it came after around 80 KMs of riding.
We ate Poori and Bhaaji and with a cup of tea it was time to start again. The photographers in the group did have a good time clicking photos at various places including those of Sun Rise and the beautiful "Sarsoon ka Kheth" later on.



On the way, there is a famous water fall. By consensus we decided to go for the waterfall before going to Sri Sailem and getting our accommodation reserved. The water fall trip should have definitely taken around 2.5 hr which included driving on the muddy road for 8 KM oneway, then roughly 350 stairs oneway and most important the bath under the cold water fall which only the selected few of us dared to try. It was amazing standing under the water falling from such great height and at such great speed and at such low temperature.




Finally we reached Sri Sailem at around 4 PM. Out of hunger the first thing ppl wanted to have was lunch, while some other took the pain of checking our reservation etc. By the time we came out from the lunch we were in for a big surprise. The accommodation was gone. Yes the guy gave our accommodation to some other ppl as we didn't turn up by 1 PM. SS has only two major lodges. Both were full. While some souls were arranging for accommodation the rest of us had a nice dose on the lawn of the lodge. At last we got an accommodation arrange nearby and we move to that place. For dinner we guys went back 9 KMs away from the place to stay to the Haritha Dhaba which looked like the only dhaba around.


After this hectic day only some of us were determined to go for the Dharshan next morning. The queue was already very long when we reached around 6:30 AM or so. Fortunately they have a concept of "Premium" Dharsan or something where you could pay 100 Rs and stand in a shorted queue. Even that queue took us around next 1 hr to finally get a 2 second glimpse of the Shivling. Then was time for a nice breakfast which we had on a dosa-thela. Amazing dosa and idlis. Then we decided to get the Prasadam. For which you have to stand in another long queue. This queue took another 1 hour overall to get max 4 peices of laddu per head, getting us 20 only, as Ram and Priya went back to wake ppl and Kannan was busy on phone(again:)).

As we were returning back, the group met us on the way and as against earlier decision we were going to see the Famous caves. We took the way through water which took us around 1.5 hrs oneway and 1 hr at the caves. The caves are beautiful, but the 1.5 hr of boat ride in the Sun was not that great. While coming back Zareer and I did get to enjoy waving the legs in the water all through while other got bored sitting monotonously (Jene ? :)


We started back from SS at around 4:30 PM and we knew it was going to be a difficult ride. What we didn't realize was the magnitude. After taking the dinner when we started again at around 10:30 PM, the ride kept getting tougher. It was pretty harsh cold and may be most of us weren't actually prepared for it either. The last 120 KMs would have been covered in around 3 hrs with pretty much a break after every 40 KMs or so, It was funny that some of us kept saying next stop would be at Charminaar :), we already had three charminars before the real one came :D. And yes, the incident regarding one of our stop at some village is worth mentioning. As we parked our bikes and were talking about the ride and work the next day etc., a Jeep came and stopped and one armed guy dressed as a civilian came out. Yes we were pretty scared. I guess everyone was wondering if were seeing the Naxals. Fortunately not, they were police guys. Ram handled the situation and we moved on. We finally reached Hyderabad at around 1:30 AM.


It turned out to be a much more amazing trip then any one of us had imagined. Great thanks to Ricky and Ram for playing the major roles and everyone else for making it a great trip by joining in. Already looking forward to the next long ride.