Gudibanda

Having a pup around the house (yes, we have a pup, and a formal intro will come along later), has spurred us on to become a wee bit more active in our daily lives. All of us have been spending more time outdoors playing with little Coco (our cutie lab), and last week, we kind of overreached ourselves and decided that we would take Coco with us on a hike up to Gudibanda fort.

Gudibanda is a popular hiking spot about a 100 km north of the city. It’s really popular as it is a fairly easy hike, and most reasonably fit people can do this without too much effort.

For a physically active person, the hike shouldn’t take more than half an hour. We, of course with the kids, and Coco ended up taking almost an hour or more.

Here are some photos of the hike (click on the photos for full images):

We left home really early in the morning, but because poor Coco got panicky and nervous in the moving car, we drove slowly and reached the hiking spot only around 8 am. The sun was already blazing and very soon we were all uncomfortably sweaty. It didn’t help also that the hill was just too steep for Coco, and so we all carried him among ourselves. Nothing better than being wrapped around some fur on a hot day, right 😀 .

Anyway, as we ascended the hill it got very breezy, and offset the heat a bit. In fact, it was so windy on the top that we had to hold tightly to each other to prevent anyone from getting blown away. Haha, just kidding. It was very breezy though as you can see from the photo below where I am clinging to Piglet.

While the views from the top of the hill were very pretty, the rock itself was bare, without any kind of protection, and it just wasn’t safe to be giving Coco (or for that matter Piglet) room to run around.

We took a quick tour around the fort, and the Shiva temple around, and then left without lingering very long.

As we went down the hill, Piglet and Coco just raced down (gravity really pushing them on), and K and I were hard-pressed to keep up (or is it down) with them. By the time we reached our car, our thighs were trembling from the downhill race. We quickly switched on the car A/C, and started planning our lunch at Indian Paratha Company – a very well-known highway joint.

I was really looking forward to the lunch, but the place was so crowded, it was just impossible. Since I had made a back-up lunch at home, we decided to just give the lunch a skip and come back home, where yummy home made spaghetti (made by moi), and this absolutely beautiful bottle of wine was just waiting to be opened.

Best way to end the day!

All these photos were short with a new lens 10-100mm Nikkor lens that I fitted on to my Nikon camera. I was nervous about this because the lens was a lot of money and I really wanted it to make a difference to the end result. So far I love it – crisp pictures with fantastic depth of field that don’t need any editing.