Need your teeth done?

I came across this street dentist in Bangalore. Tried for a surreptitious shot, but he saw me, and was absolutely delighted to show off his work.

The work was in the mouth of his patient though. So he grabbed the poor chap's head, swung it round for me, and grabbed the man's newly installed false teeth for optimal display!


I like a man who's proud of his workmanship!

White knuckle travel

At first glance this could be a picture of fairly orderly traffic. Two cars on the left, and a bus and a truck on the other side of the road, going the other way.

Alas no. This is India. It's actually a picture of us, and alongside us the truck which has just overtaken us. Coming the other way are a bus and a car, side by side. All four vehicles are about to come together in an almighty head-on crash!

At the last moment the truck swerves back to the left, and the oncoming car sees the light and ducks back in behind the bus. Crisis averted once more!

This sort of thing happens every minute or two on every drive on every Indian road! On this occasion it was made worse by the road being the nine-hairpin-bend stretch of road which drops 700m from the Western Ghats to the Malabar Coast. Wherever you are though, the best strategy is to just not look out the front. Let the driver do the driving (and the honking of the horn every few seconds). All you can do is quietly ponder your funeral arrangements.

The accident rate is indeed high. But it can't be as high as we'd expect it to be. We're still alive after all. The nominal road rules may be totally irrelevant, but there are conventions and patterns which presumably must be followed, about who wins and who loses the constant games of chicken.

Within the cities it's all played out at a slower pace, because there's traffic gridlock most of the time! Here are some views out the front in Bangalore, Trivandrum, and Nagercoil.

All aboard!

This sighting, in Mysore in Karnataka, India the other week, represents my personal world record. Some years ago I sighted a family of five on a motorbike, in Malaysia or Indonesia I think it was. But I've never managed to snap a picture of more than four. Then along comes this group of six. And here's the proof!

Colourful women of Tamil Nadu

Being pilgrim season in southern India, it's entirely possible most of these women aren't actually from Tamil Nadu itself. We were in the southernmost city of Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin), and it was extremely heavily pilgrimmed at the time.

Colourful women of Karnataka

And Kerala doesn't actually have a monopoly in this department. It's a similar story all over India, though there are undoubtedly variations in styles and colour. Here are a few pics from the neighbouring state of Karnataka.

Colourful women of Kerala 2

The Kerala part of our trip took in the Wayanad region, Cochin (Kochi), Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram - 7 syllables in the local name!), Kovalam and Varkala beaches, and the 'backwaters' of Kollam, Poovar, and Kumarakom.

Colourful women of Kerala 1

It's one of the (many) things that jump out at you in India, just how colourful and generally photogenic are the women, while most men look quite drab and ordinary alongside them. So, all in the line of duty, I recorded some of these sights on our recent trip to South India.

The lioness? Well she's looking a bit tired, and she's currently in captivity. (This one's in Trivandrum Zoo.) Her name: Aishwarya!

The model in the jewellery ad, by the way, is Priya Anand.