Ooty, Lake

Well. Some more photographs from round Ooty - a night shot close to a farmers market, some health care centers, and honest stores...










Village in tea gardens...



And the Summerschool was over. On friday afternoon Madhu arranged a nice trip for us. To the telescope house, the tea factory (see earlier post) and an artificial lake where you could make boat trips. was a lot of fun and a nice way to finish school.
In the evening we went to Ooty's botanical garden for a family photo ;)

Ooty, Tea

Ooty itself is surrounded by tea, forest, dark red earth, houses and clothes in deep saturated colors.
You see a lot especially at the market, which was almost like a basar with lots of small kiosks, narrow ways with sun sails, where you could find everything from fruit, meat, living animals, books, tailors, shoes, pest control,... I didn't take pictures there.




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Tea Factory

The factory is nice but small and can be visited. Don't expect a huge facility. You can get great tea there, some sorts are boiled in milk (no water) like the 'cardamon tea' I got for myself.

Summer School in Winter

The School itself was at the Radio Astronomy Center close to the Hotel. About 8 km from the Hotel, but with unpaved roads you'll learn fast, that the most accurate unit to measure distance is hours - it took us about half an hour to get there.

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We stood up early every morning, when it was still cold, about 3-5 ºC, where you could still see the morning fog, and when the bees were still sleeping.





The RAC has a very special telescope that is over 530 m long, and got something like 1100 wires to build a reflecting surface. It's also built on a slope, so that it is parallel to the rotational axes of the earth. How cool is that?


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It is amazing. You can tell because during every tea break there were at least 2-3 people who kept staring at it. A real beauty.




I also met Siva again, who shared the office with me when he was studying in Linz.

And here is the colleague who is sharing the office with me for 3 years now.

An Introduction to India

What do you guys know about India? Something you saw on TV or what your friends told you? Forget it, you got to go and see for yourself, it will be completely different!

I normally don't do anything like this, but this time I kept a diary, because I got the feeling, that I would forget it all. There was just too much input and it was really intense on all the senses.



That is about the Journey we were going to undertake.


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After about 14h of flight from Munich with a stop in Dubai we arrived in Bangalore in the morning.



We were picked up by Sankeerth who brought us to the Tata Institute of Science where we could relax a bit and had lunch before we continued to the bus station to catch our bus to Ooty (7-8h drive).



We reached Ooty (2250m altitude) in the morning - coming through a forest in the cold, blue, morning fog, before we went up the mountains. The planes were still dark, when the sun rose and sent it's golden beams over the mountain tops, it was awesome. Suddenly everything was colorful and the birds started to make noise (not all of them have a beautiful singing voice)...
We drove through the dark green tea gardens sprinkled with red and white and purple and ... flowers.



Tamil Nadu in the late morning sun - hot enough to burn your skin during a tea break, if you are used to central european winter...

Snow Hankies

I'm back from india (Summer to Winter in less than 24h) with a lot of pics, but had no time yet to sort them out. Until then I got 3 shots from this Sunday, where we had snowflakes of the size of hankies.