travel – Page 2 – Pertinent Observations

Hot hands in safaris

We entered Serengeti around 12:30 pm on Saturday, having stopped briefly at the entrance gate to have lunch packed for us by our hotel in Karatu. Around 1 pm, our guide asked us to put the roof up, so we could stand and get a 360 degree view. “This is the cheetah region”, he told us.

For the next hour or so we just kept going round and round. We went off the main path towards some rocks. Some other jeeps had done the same. None of us had any luck.

By 2 pm we had seen nothing. Absolutely nothing. For a place like Serengeti, that takes some talent, given the overall density of animals there. We hadn’t even seen a zebra, or a wildebeest. Maybe a few gazelles (I could never figure out how to tell between Thomson’s and Grant’s through the trip, despite seeing tonnes of both on the trip). “This is not even the level of what we saw in Tarangire yesterday”, we were thinking.

And then things started to happen. First there was a herd of zebras. On Friday we had missed an opportunity to take a video of a zebra crossing the road (literally a “zebra crossing”, get it?). And now we had a whole herd of zebras crossing the road in front of us. This time we didn’t miss the opportunity (though there was no Spice Telecom).

And then we saw a herd of buffaloes. And then a bunch of hippos in a pool. We asked our guide to take us closer to them, and he said “oh don’t worry about hippos. Tomorrow I’ll take you to a hippo pool with over a fifty hippos”. And sped off in the opposite direction. There was a pack of lions fallen asleep under a tree, with the carcass of a wildebeest they had just eaten next to them (I posted that photo the other day).

This was around 3 pm. By 4 pm, we had seen a large herd of wildebeest and zebra on their great annual migration. And then seen a cheetah sitting on a termite hill, also watching the migration. And yet another pool with some 50 hippos lazing in it. It was absolutely surreal.

It was as if we had had a “hot hand” for an hour, with tremendous sightings after a rather barren first half of the afternoon. We were to have another similar “hot hand” on Monday morning, on our way out from the park. Again in the course of half an hour (when we were driving rather fast, with the roof down, trying to exit the park ASAP) we saw a massive herd of elephants, a mother and baby cheetah, a pack of lions and a single massive male lion right next to the road.

If you are the sort who sees lots of patterns, it is possibly easy to conclude that “hot hands” are a thing in wildlife. That when you have one good sighting, it is likely to be followed by a few other good sightings. However, based on a total of four days of safaris on this trip, I strongly believe that here at least hot hands are a fallacy.

But first a digression. The issue of “hot hands” has been a long-standing one in basketball. First some statisticians found that the hot hand truly exists – that NBA (or was it NCAA?) players who have made a few baskets in succession are more likely to score off their next shot. Then, other statisticians found some holes in the argument and said that it was simply a statistical oddity. And yet again (if i remember correctly) yet another group of statisticians showed that with careful analysis, the hot hand actually exists. This was rationalised as “when someone has scored a few consecutive baskets, their confidence is higher, which improves the chances of scoring off the next attempt”.

So if a hot hand exists, it is more to do with the competence and confidence of the person who is executing the activity.

In wildlife, though, it doesn’t work that way. While it is up to us (and our guides) to spot the animals, that you have spotted something doesn’t make it more likely to spot something else (in fact, false positives in spotting can go up when you are feeling overconfident). Possibly the only correlation between consecutive spottings is that guides of various jeeps are in constant conversation on the radio, and news of spottings get shared. So if a bunch of jeeps have independently spotted stuff close to each other, all the jeeps will get to see all these stuffs (no pun intended), getting a “hot hand”.

That apart, there is no statistical reason in a safari to have a “hot hand”.

Rather, what is more likely is selection bias. When we see a bunch of spottings close to one another, we think it is because we have a “hot hand”. However, when we are seeing animals only sporadically (like we did on Sunday, not counting the zillions of wildebeest and zebra migrating), we don’t really register that we are “not having a hot hand”.

It is as if you are playing a game of coin tosses, where you register all the heads but simply ignore the tails, and theorise about clumping of heads. When a low probability event happens (multiple sightings in an hour, for example), it registers better in our heads, and we can sometimes tend to overrepresent them in our memories. The higher probability (or “lower information content”) events we simply ignore! And so we assume that events are more impactful on average than they actually are.

Ok now i’m off on a ramble (this took a while to write – including making that gif among other things) – but Nassim Taleb talks about it this in one of his early Incerto books (FBR or Black Swan – that if you only go by newspaper reports, you are likely to think that lower average crime cities are more violent, since more crimes get reported there).

And going off on yet another ramble – hot hands can be a thing where the element of luck is relatively small. Wildlife spotting has a huge amount of luck involved, and so even with the best of skills there is only so much of a hot hand you can produce.

So yeah – there is no hot hand in wildlife safaris.

Animals in motion and animals at rest

We are back in moshi now after a 4 day safari across northern Tanzania. We did one safari each in tarangire national park and ngorongoro crater, and two whole days of safari at Serengeti. During that time we even spent the nights in (luxury) tents inside the Serengeti park.

In terms of animal “sightings” there was absolutely no comparison to what we’ve seen in india (Bandipur / kabini / Bhadra). Back home we’ve failed to see a single big cat in the wild, across 10 safaris. We very easily went into double digits on this trip.

The main difference I think is the terrain. Karnataka is all thick forests which means that visibility is low. An animal needs to be within a couple of tens of metres from the road for you to be able to see it.

In the African savannah (will come to that in a bit, or in another blogpost), though, you can literally see for miles and miles and miles and …

https://open.spotify.com/track/64SFBGTQvXgEHds3F01rpc?si=_sYbcLzZQ5eCaJGGZ1T09Q&context=spotify%3Asearch%3Ai%2Bcan%2Bsee%2Bdor%2B

On the first day in tarangire I spotted an elephant from at least a kilometre away. Turned out it was a herd, drinking water from the tarangire ~~river~~ stream. And we could keep our eyes on it while our driver-guide navigated the paths and bends to take us close to them. This kind of visibility would have been impossible in the Karnataka forests.

It was more stark with the big cats. If you go on any safaris in Karnataka and ask the guides about potential sightings they talk about it in terms of “movements”. Stuff like “there has been good movement of tigers in the last two days but not so much of leopards” etc.

This is important because in the thick forests of Karnataka pretty much the only time you can spot big cats is when they are moving. When they are at rest (as big cats are wont to be a lot of the time) they are resting away from the roads, and because of the terrain they are impossible to spot.

Things can’t be more different in the East African savannah. Our first sightings of lions, on Saturday afternoon, for example, was of a pack sleeping right next to the road.

My fingers added for context, to show how close they were

Even when the animals are resting away from the tracks, the nature of terrain means that you can still spot them. And this – the fact that you can see for miles in the savannah – means that the chances of spotting an animal at rest are significantly higher.

We saw at least four other packs of lions resting under bushes. Our only leopard sighting was of one sleeping on a tree (from what I hear it was there for so long – obviously, since it was sleeping – that pretty much everyone who was in Serengeti on Sunday afternoon managed to see it). Our first cheetah sighting was of one resting on a termite hill. And so on.

So the main reason you see more big cats in Tanzania, compare to india, is that the terrain allows you to see them at rest. And the cat lifestyle is based on short hunts followed by long periods of rest, which means this massively ups the chances of seeing them.

Now I wonder how it is in grassy areas in india, such as Assam.

Tanzania – initial thoughts

This is our first overseas holiday since august 2019 and it still hasn’t sunk in that we’re not india. It’s been 4-5 hours since we landed at Kilimanjaro international airport, and while thjings have been nice there is very little evidence so far that we are in “forin”.

Vehicles drive on the left side of the road. There are plenty of motorcycles. Trucks are brightly painted. Buses look like those in our city, though a lot of them seem smaller.

The weather is also similar – we’ve swapped 12.8 degree north and 920M above sea level for 3 degree south and 1000M above sea level. It was sunny in the afternoon but there has always been a nice breeze blowing – from the nearby Kilimanjaro!

The place is dry though. there is a lot of dust. And dusty winds. And very little vegetation (outside of our hotel). Our guide, on the way from the airport to the hotel, informed us that rains have been delayed this year and so things have been dry.

So all put together, it’s so far been like being somewhere in india itself, just a part that is drier and dustier than bangalore. The only differences so far have been –

Our guide drove far more carefully than I’ve seen Indian drivers. very measured in overtaking. No honking. Etc.

Looks like liquor licences here are far more liberal than in india. There is some charm sitting at a tiny hotel bar drinking. India’s restricted liquor licenses (Im told there have been no new liquor licenses in Karnataka since 1993 or something) means you need a certain scale to operate a bar. So you have few quaint dribbling places.

But that’s about it. Midway through this blogpost the power supply at the hotel went off. and this post will get published when the power gets restored. And I don’t even know if the hotel here has power backup!

Cross docking in Addis Ababa

I’m writing this from Addis Ababa bole international airport, waiting for my connection to Kilimanjaro. We arrived here some 3 hours back, on a direct flight from bangalore.

The flight was fine, and uneventful. It was possibly half empty, though – the guy in the front seat had all 3 seats to himself and had lay down across them.

Maybe the only issue with the flight was that they gave us “dinner” at the ungodly time of 3am (1230 Eastern Africa time). I know why – airlines prefer to serve as soon as they take off since food is freshest then (rather than reheating at the end of the flight). And if they serve two meals the second one is usually a cold one (sandwiches cakes etc)

The airport here is also uneventful. There are a couple of bars and a few nondescript looking coffee shops. It is linear, with all gates being laid out in a row (reminds me of KL, and very unlike “star shaped airports” such as Barcelona or Delhi).

In any case I’ve been doing the rounds since morning looking for information of my flight gate. The last time I saw it hadn’t yet been published. But there was something very interesting about the flight schedule.

Basically, this airport serves as a cross dock between Africa and the rest of the world, taking advantage of its location in one corner of the continent.

For example, all flights that have either departed in the last hour or due to depart in the next 2 hours are to various destinations in Africa (barring one flight to São Paulo and Buenos Aires).

Kinshasa. Cape Town. Douala. Antananarivo. Entebbe. Accra. Lubumbashi via Lilongwe. Mine to Kilimanjaro (and then onward to Zanzibar). Etc. etc.

No flight that goes north or east, barring one to Djibouti. And no take offs between 6am (when we landed here) till 815 (Cape Town). And until around 8, people kept streaming into the airport (and the lines at the toilets kept getting longer!)

Ethiopian’s schedule at bangalore is also strange. Flights arrive at 8am 3 days of the week and then hang in there idly till 230 am the next morning. Time wise, that’s incredibly low utilisation of a costly asset like an aircraft (that said it’s a Boeing 737Max).

After looking at the airport schedule though it makes more sense to me. Basically in the morning, flights bring in passengers from all over Asia and Europe, and connect them to various places in Africa.

In the evenings, flights stream in from all around Africa and cross dock people to destinations in Europe and Asia. Currently the cross dock is one way – out of Africa in the evenings and into Africa in the mornings.

This means that there are some destinations where, given time of travel, the only way to make this cross dock work is to keep the aircraft idle at the destination. In African destinations for example, I expect shorter turnarounds – this morning I noticed that the first set of departures were to far away locations – Cape Town, Johannesburg, Accra, Harare and then to Lusaka, etc.

I don’t expect this to last long though. In a few years (maybe already delayed by the pandemic) I expect ethiopian to double its flight capacity across all existing destinations. Then, it can operate both into Africa and out of Africa cross docks twice in a day. And won’t need to waste precious flight depreciation time at faraway airports such as bangalore.

PS: so far I haven’t seen a single flight from any other airline apart from Ethiopian at the airport here.

Resorts

We spent the last three days at a resort, here in Karnataka. The first day went off very peacefully. On the second day, a rather loud group checked in. However, our meal times generally didn’t intersect with theirs and they weren’t too much of a bother.

Yesterday, a bigger and louder (and rather obnoxious – they were generally extremely rude to the resort staff) group checked in. Unfortunately their meal times overlapped with ours, and their unpleasantness had a bearing on us. Our holiday would have been far better had this group not checked in to our resort, but there was no way we could have anticipated, or controlled for that.

The moral of the story, basically, is that your experience at a resort is highly dependent on who else is checked in to the resort at the same time.

The thing with resorts is that unlike “regular hotels”, you end up spending all your time during your holiday in the resort itself, so the likelihood of bumping into or otherwise encountering others who are staying at the resort is far higher. And this means that if you don’t want to interact with some of the people there, you sometimes don’t really have a choice.

Of course, it helped that the resort we were in had private swimming pools attached to each room, and was rather large. So the only times we encountered the other groups at the resort was at meal times. However, as we found during our last day there, that itself was enough to make the experience somewhat unpleasant.

My wife and I had a long conversation last night on what we could do to mitigate this risk. We wondered if the resorts we have been going to are “not premium enough” (then again, a resort with private swimming pools in each room can be considered to be as premium as it gets). However, we quickly realised that ability to pay for a holiday is not at all correlated with pleasantness.

We wondered if resorts that are out of the way or in otherwise not so popular places are a better hedge against this. Now, with smaller or less popular resorts, the risk of having unpleasant co-guests is smaller (since the number of co-guests is lower). However, if one or more of the co-guests happens to be unpleasant, it will impact you a lot more. And that’s a bit of a risk.

Maybe the problem is with India, we thought, since one of the nice resort holidays we’ve had in the last couple of years was in Maldives. Then again, we quickly remembered the time at Taj Bentota (on our honeymoon) where the swimming pool had been taken over by a rather loud tour group, driving us nuts (and driving us away to the beach).

We thought of weekday vs weekend. Peak season vs off season. School holidays vs exam season. We were unable to draw any meaningful correlations.

There is no solution, it seemed. Then we spent time analysing why we didn’t get bugged by fellow-guests at Maldives (my wife helpfully remembered that the family at the table next to ours at one of the dinners was rather loud and obnoxious). It had to do with size. It was a massive resort. Because the resort was so massive, there would be other guests who were obnoxious. However, in the size of the resort, they would “become white noise”.

So, for now, we’ve taken a policy decision that for our further travel in India, we’ll either go to really large resorts, or we’ll do a “tourist tour” (seeing places, basically) while staying at “business hotels”. This also means that we’re unlikely to do another multi-day holiday until Covid-19 is well under control.

Postscript: Having spent a considerable amount of time in the swimming pool attached to our room, I now have a good idea on why public swimming pools haven’t yet been opened up post covid-19. Basically, I found myself blowing my nose and spitting into the pool a fair bit during the time when I was there. Since the only others using it at that time were my immediate family, it didn’t matter, but this tells you why public swimming pools may not be particularly safe.

Postscript 2: One other problem we have with Indian resorts is the late dinner. At home, we adults eat at 6pm (and our daughter before that). Pretty much every resort we’ve stayed in over the last year and half has started serving dinner only by 8, or sometimes at 9pm. And this has sort of messed with our “systems”.

Games of luck and skill

My good friend Anuroop has two hobbies – poker and wildlife photography. And when we invited him to NED Talks some 5 years ago, he decided to combine these two topics into the talk, by speaking about “why wildlife photography is like poker” (or the other way round, I’ve forgotten).

I neither do wildlife photography nor play poker so I hadn’t been able to appreciate his talk in full when he delivered it. However, our trip to Jungle Lodges River Tern Resort (at Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary) earlier this year demonstrated to me why poker and wildlife photography are similar – they are both “games of luck AND skill”.

One debate that keeps coming up in Indian legal circles is whether a particular card game (poker, rummy, etc.) is a “game of luck” or a “game of skill”. While this might sound esoteric, it is a rather important matter – games of skill don’t need any permission from any authority, while games of luck are banned to different extents by different states (they are seen as being similar to “gambling”, and the moralistic Indian states don’t want to permit that).

Many times in the recent past, courts in India have declared poker and rummy to be “games of skill“, which means “authorities” cannot disrupt any such games. Still, for different reasons, they remain effectively illegal in certain states.

In any case, what makes games like poker interesting is that they combine skill and luck. This is also what makes games like this addictive. That there is skill involved means that you get constantly better over time, and the more you play, the greater the likelihood that you will win (ok it doesn’t increase at the same rate for everyone, and there is occasional regression as well).

If it were a pure game of skill, then things would get boring, since in a game of skill the better player wins every single time. So unless you get a “sparring partner” of approximately your own level, nobody will want to play with you (this is one difficulty with games like chess).

With luck involved, however, the odds change. It is possible to beat someone much better (on average) than you, or lose to someone much worse (on average). In other words, if you are designing an Elo rating system for a game like poker, you need to change players’ ratings by very little after each game (compared to a game of pure skill such as chess).

Because there is luck involved, there is “greater information content” in the result of each game (remember from information theory that a perfectly fair coin has the most information content (1 bit) among all coins). And this makes the game more fun to play. And the better player is seen as better only when lots of games are played. And so people want to play more.

It is the same with wildlife photography. It is a game of skill because as you do more and more of it, you know where to look for the tigers and leopards (and ospreys and wild dogs). You know where and how long you should wait to maximise your chances of a “sighting”. The more you do it, the better you become at photography as well.

And it is a game of luck because despite your best laid plans, there is a huge amount of luck involved. Just on the day you set up, the tiger might decide to take another path to the river. The osprey might decide on a siesta that is a little bit longer than usual.

At the entrance of JLR River Tern Lodge, there is a board that shows what animals were “sighted” during each safari in the preceding one week. Each day, the resort organises two safaris, one each in the morning and afternoon, and some of them are by boat and some by jeep.

I remember trying to study the boards and try and divine patterns to decide when we should go by boat and when by jeep (on the second day of our stay there, we were the “longest staying guests” and thus given the choice of safari). One the first evening, in our jeep safari, we saw a herd of elephants. And a herd of gaur. And lots of birds. And a dead deer.

That we had “missed out” on tigers and leopards meant that we wanted to do it again. If what we saw depended solely on the skill of the naturalist and the driver who accompanied us, we would not have been excited to go into the forest again.

However, the element of luck meant that we wanted to just keep going, and going.

Games of pure luck or pure skill can get boring after a while. However, when both luck and skill get involved, they can really really get addictive. Now I fully appreciate Anuroop’s NED Talk.

Night trains

In anticipation of tonight’s Merseyside Derby, I was thinking of previous instances of this fixture at Goodison Park. My mind first went back to the game in the 2013-14 season, which was a see-saw 3-3 draw, with the Liverpool backline being incredibly troubled by Romelu Lukaku, and Daniel Sturridge scoring with a header immediately after coming on to make it 3-3 (and Joe Allen had missed a sitter earlier when Liverpool were 2-1 up).

I remember my wife coming back home from work in the middle of that game, and I didn’t pay attention to her until it was over. She wasn’t particularly happy about that, but the intense nature of the game gave me a fever (that used to happen often in the 2013-14 and 2008-9 seasons).

Then I remember Everton winning 3-0 once, though I don’t remember when that was (googling tells me that was in the 2006-7 season, when I was already a Liverpool fan, but not watching regularly).

And then I started thinking about what happened to this game last season, and then remembered that it was a 0-0 draw. Incidentally, it was on the same day that I travelled to Liverpool – I had a ticket for an Anfield Tour the next morning.

I now see that I had written about getting to Liverpool after I got to my hotel that night. However, I haven’t written about what happened before that. My train from Euston was around 8:00 pm. I remember leaving home (which was in Ealing) at around 6 or so, and then taking two tubes (Central changing to Victoria at Oxford Circus) to get to Euston. And then buying chewing gum and a bottle of water at Marks and Spencer while waiting for my train.

I also remember that while leaving home that evening, I was scared. I was psyched out. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. This was a trip to Liverpool I had been wanting to make for the best part of 14 years. I had kept putting it off during my stay in London until I knew that I was going to move out of London in two weeks’ time. Liverpool were having a great season (they would go on to win the Champions League, and only narrowly lose the Premiser League title).

I was supposed to be excited. Instead I was nervous. My nerve possibly settled only after I was seated in the train that evening.

Thinking about it, I basically hate night trains (well, this wasn’t an overnight train, but it started late in the evening). I hate night buses as well. And this only applies to night trains and buses that take me away from my normal place of residence – starting towards “home” late in the night never worries me.

This anxiety possibly started when I was in IIT Madras. I remember clearly then that I used to sleep comfortably without fail while travelling from Madras to Bangalore, but almost always never slept or only slept fitfully when travelling in the opposite direction. While in hindsight it all appears fine, I never felt particularly settled when I was at IITM.

And consequently, anything that reminds me of travelling to IITM psyches me out. I always took the night train while travelling there, and the anxiety would start on the drive to the railway station. Even now, sometimes, I get anxious while taking that road late in the evening.

Then, taking night trains has been indelibly linked to travelling to Madras, and something that I’ve come to fear as well. While I haven’t taken a train in India since 2012, my experience with the trip to Liverpool last year tells me that even non-overnight night trains have that effect on me.

And then, of course, there is the city of Chennai as well. The smells of the city after the train crosses Basin Bridge trigger the first wave of anxiety. Stepping out of the railway station and the thought of finding an autorickshaw trigger the next wave (things might be different now with Uber/Ola, but I haven’t experienced that).

The last time I went to Chennai was for a close friend’s wedding in 2012. I remember waking up early on the day of the wedding and then having a massive panic attack. I spent long enough time staring at the ceiling of my hotel room that I ended up missing the muhurtham.

I’ve made up my mind that the next time I have to go to Chennai, I’ll just drive there. And for sure, I’m not going to take a train leaving Bangalore in the night.

Yet another “big data whisky”

A long time back I had used a primitive version of my Single Malt recommendation app to determine that I’d like Ardbeg. Presently, the wife was travelling to India from abroad, and she got me a bottle. We loved it.

And so I had screenshots from my app stored on my phone all the time, to be used while at duty frees, so I would know what whiskies to buy.

And then about a year back, we started planning a visit to Scotland. If you remember, we were living in London then, and my wife’s cousin and her family were going to visit us over Christmas. And the plan was to go to the Scottish Highlands for a few days. And that had to include a distillery tour.

Out came my app again, to determine which distillery to visit. I had made a scatter plot (which I have unfortunately lost since) with the distance from Inverness (where we were going to be based) on one axis, and the likelihood of my wife and I liking a whisky (based on my app) on the other (by this time, Ardbeg was firmly in the “calibration set”).

The clear winner was Clynelish – it was barely 100 kilometers away from Inverness, promised a nice drive there, and had a very high similarity score to the stuff that we liked. I presently called them to make a booking for a distillery tour. The only problem was that it’s a Diageo distillery, and Diageo distillery doesn’t allow kids inside (we were travelling with three of them).

I was proud of having planned my vacation “using data science”. I had made up a blog post in my head that I was going to write after the vacation. I was basically picturing “turning around to the umpire and shouting ‘howzzat'”. And then my hopes were dashed.

A week after I had made the booking, I got a call back from the distillery informing me that it was unfortunately going to be closed during our vacation, and so we couldn’t visit. My heart sank. We finally had to make do with two distilleries that were pretty close to Inverness, but which didn’t rate highly according to my app.

My cousin-in-law-in-law and I first visited Glen Ord, another Diageo distillery, leaving our wives and kids back in the hotel. The tour was nice, but the whisky at the distillery was rather underwhelming. The high point was the fact that Glen Ord also supplies highly peated malt to other Diageo distilleries such as Clynelish (which we couldn’t visit) and Talisker (one of my early favourites).

A day later, we went to the more family friendly Tomatin distillery, to the south of Inverness (so we could carry my daughter along for the tour. She seemed to enjoy it. The other kids were asleep in the car with their dad). The tour seemed better there, but their flagship whisky seemed flat. And then came Cu Bocan, a highly peated whisky that they produce in very limited quantities and distribute in a limited fashion.

Initially we didn’t feel anything, but then the “smoke hit from the back”. Basically the initial taste of the whisky was smooth, but as you swallowed it, the peat would hit you. It was incredibly surreal stuff. We sat at the distillery’s bar for a while downing glasses full of Cu Bocan.

The cousin-in-law-in-law quickly bought a bottle to take back to Singapore. We dithered, reasoning we could “use Amazon to deliver it to our home in London”. The muhurta for the latter never arrived, and a few months later we were on our way to India. Travelling with six suitcases and six handbags and a kid meant that we were never going to buy duty free stuff on our way home (not that Cu Bocan was available in duty free).

In any case, Clynelish is also not widely available in duty free shops, so we couldn’t have that as well for a long time. And then we found an incredibly well stocked duty free shop in Maldives, on our way back from our vacation there in August. A bottle was duly bought.

And today the auspicious event arrived for the bottle to be opened. And it’s spectacular. A very different kind of peat than Lagavulin (a bottle of which we just finished yesterday). This one hits the mouth from both the front and the back.

And I would like to call Clynelish the “new big data whisky”, having discovered it through my app, almost going there for a distillery tour, and finally tasting it a year later.

Highly recommended! And I’d highly recommend my app as well!

Cheers!

Beach holiday

I can’t believe I waited I was until 36 to take a beach resort vacation. Well, given my experience with beaches during my early life you can’t really blame me – the mental model of the beach I had in my head was an urban beach, something of the sort of Chennai’s Elliots Beach, where all the action happens outside of the water.

At best you would roll up your pants a bit (or wear shorts) and wade a foot or two deep into the water, and let the waves hit you. The water was too dirty to let it touch the rest of you. You would instead spend time on the sand, talking and eating random things – stuff you couldn’t imagine doing an entire holiday doing.

My first “proper” visit to Goa in 2007 also left me underwhelmed. Again the water wasn’t worth getting into, and I didn’t understand why you needed to go so far to just sit in one place and eat and drink all day – that could be achieved in just about any bar in Bangalore.

And so in 2008 or so when the wife (then an “online friend” – we’d never met) asked me if I’m a beach types or a river and mountain types, I instantly chose the latter. Mountains gave you something to “do” – climb and walk around. My memories from bathing in streams in childhood were also rather pleasant.

Since then we’ve together visited two beach resorts, though both were as part of larger “sight seeing” trips of Sri Lanka. Once we went to Bentota, where we spent two days. We got bored enough after a day to spend the second evening watching inane stuff on TV. That Bentota experience had meant that on our next trip to Sri Lanka we had scheduled only a day for ourselves at Trincomalee, in one of the best beaches I’ve ever been to.

Two and two years (first in Barcelona; then in London) in Europe meant that most of our vacations in that time were “urban” – visiting cities and walking around them and taking in the historic sights and eating interesting food. It got a bit boring after a while, so when we got back to Asia earlier this year we decided it was time for a luxury “relaxing” vacation.

We went to this resort called Kurumba in Maldives, just a 10 minute boat ride away from the Maldives airport. It was among the quickest “get down to business” vacations I’ve ever been on. Our Air India flight touched down in Maldives around 4pm. By 5:30, we had been shown our rooms, changed and already hit the beach!

The next two days were spent there. While the image you have of a beach resort is that it’s a “passive” vacation (where you do nothing) this wasn’t so. I spent most of the time in water, mostly at the beach but also some time in the swimming pool (which the daughter found more fun – another post on that coming up).

We hadn’t taken along snorkelling equipment but that didn’t deter me. I put on my swimming goggles, waded close to coral reefs and just dived into the water. I saw lots of marine life in there – colourful fish and plants and all that. There were many more such reefs within 100 meters of the shore, and the shore was 200 metres from our room.

Wednesday typified our vacation. It was a bright and sunny day, which meant it was hot outside water, and that I now have massive sunburns all over my shoulders and back and arms. At 7am we had hit the beach. An hour and half of wading and dunking in water, looking at fish and chasing after one really beautiful turtle, we showered and went for breakfast.

After a long leisurely breakfast we were by the swimming pool, and due to the heat we were soon inside the water. Most of the morning was spent inside the water, and a drink and lunch were had at the poolside bar. Then we returned to our room and when the daughter refused to fall asleep, we hit the beach once again, for an hour or two. And then in the evening we went for a dolphin boat tour, before settling for a two hour long dinner.

It was a short vacation – only three days long, but it was a highly effective one. I think the volume of activity, even if it were in one place, meant that it helped take our minds completely off life as usual. Now I’m trying to slowly work my way back to life, and this post is part of that.

I’ll be back here again and again soon, to put more pertinent observations about this awesome vacation.

Tourist experiences

The big trend nowadays is to do tourism without doing “touristy stuff”. What counts for social currency is to do “authentic stuff” and to avoid things that are “made for tourists”. So tourists try to not visit places with too many other tourists, and go out of their way to find “authentic experiences”.

However, our recent holiday in Lisbon showed us that not all “touristy things” are the same. There were tourist experiences we liked, and those that we abhorred. Marginal differences made a huge difference in how we experienced places, and not all “tourist experiences” were bad.

For example, on each of the three days we had breakfast in restaurants that seemed to almost wholly cater to tourists. It was possibly a function of living in a part of town (Alfama) that is now host to a lot of tourists. Each day we would check on google for places to have breakfast at, pick one and go.

All of these places had brunch menus, which were pretty good. All of them seemed overpriced given what I’d heard of Lisbon’s price levels. Waiters all spoke very good English. And people at other tables seemed to be tourists. But the food was generally of a good quality, though coffee was bad.

On the other hand, there were these restaurants where we ended up for lunch at clearly touristy places, where you knew very quickly that the food wasn’t up to the mark. One Asian restaurant we went to (we’d been walking for a while and went in desperation) served Indian Chinese food – not something you’d expect in Europe. The pork belly was cooked excellently, but then slathered with sriracha! The previous day, a restaurant close to the Cathedral had charged a fortune for a bottle of water after denying tap water. The food there was rather ordinary as well.

The contrast in tourist experiences wasn’t just about food. As I mentioned earlier, we were in a touristy part of town called Alfama, but it was a nice touristy part of town. Lines (at the castle, for example) were never too long. No place was that crowded (admittedly we went in the off season, and on weekdays). You never got intimidated. And there was the occasional smile or nod to people you came across.

On the middle day of our trip, though, we headed to Belem (another touristy part of town), to Jeronimo’s Monastery. The tourist experience there was something else. The crowds were massive everywhere. Lines to buy tickets were long. The feeling one got was that if we weren’t careful we might be robbed. There were lots of beggars around. The entire atmosphere was intimidating. It was as if we were longing for “our touristy places”. And in very quick time we had made our way back towards Alfama.

So through the trip I decided that avoiding “touristy places” isn’t a good strategy during holidays – touristy places are touristy for a reason, and the effort to avoid them can be significant. Instead, what we should avoid are tourist traps. We need to do some research and go to places that are well rated. There is nothing wrong in doing touristy stuff. All we need to do is to do the “good touristy stuff”.