As all the TV channels are showing of what all happened in India & rest of the world last year, I also got tempted to jot down what all happening happened with Singampallis :) I am listing them down and everybody is welcome to add to the list. I feel the last year had been very good for all of us, and I thank god for every thing!
So here we go...
-Lavi topping her 3rd year(actually this is not even a news this happens every year :) )
-Raghav's arrival
-Sarda attah's retirement
-Arjun's arrival
-Madhu's baby news
-Sumi's Job placement
-Laavi's job placement
-Kanth's promotion
-Sarda attah's Kavali home coming
-Kavali home AGAIN completely ours :)
-Visham babai bought house
-Krupa's promotion and job shift to E-bay
-Poonam & Krups shifting to their new house
-Sarda attahs new house purchase
-Vishnalayam work got over
-Ma completed 60 years!
-Mriduls MS completion
-Adi's successful culture trip
And last but not the least William & Kate got married! :)
Back in US, recovering from Jet Lag. I will post the whole trip details in a couple of days, but wanted to share my experience at the GBR, which merits its own lengthy post. There are NO PHOTOS. We were so focused on the incredible scenes around us that we did not stop to take pictures, the thought simply did not enter our mind. I will try to share similar photos / videos by others to give you a sense of what we had experienced.
Our trip to the GBR started from Cairns where we boarded a catamaran by Reef Magic Cruises. On board, the people from the cruise company shared the possibilities to explore the reef including Snorkeling and Scuba Diving. I signed up for both immediately. http://www.reefmagiccruises.com/
For the uninitiated, Snorkeling is where you wear flippers, a face mask with goggles and a breathing tube, so that you can float over the water's surface and look into the water while breathing through your mouth.
For scuba diving, you wear an oxygen tank on your back and you are completely submerged under water, breathing through your mouth.
Now that the technicalities are explained, let us dive in (pardon the pun!!!!)
I cannot really find words to justify the experience. Amazing, incredible, awesome....somehow they fall short at describing the magnitude and magnificence of the coral reef and its marine life. A natural reef that can be seen from the outer space, the GBR is home to millions of different species. I was fortunate enough to get a glimpse of this living, breathing and growing organism filled with all possible colors one can imagine.
The catamaran took us about 60km into the ocean, to the outer reef. Here we changed into our wetsuits to get protection from the jelly fish, which could give you a nasty sting. Then we all donned our face masks, and Aditya and Srinivas joined the instructor for a guided snorkel tour( I will let Aditya share his experience in his own words). I took a detour to the scuba diving station to get fitted with my inflatable vest, oxygen tank and flippers. The instructor took a group of 4 of us to an underwater chamber to practice breathing through our mouth from the tank. After overcoming the initial panic of not being able to breath through my nose, I got used to the scuba tank. One of our party did not feel comfortable and left. After 10 minutes, the guide took the 3 of us into the ocean, where the rest started panicking....In 5 minutes, the guide pushed us back to the platform and said we were not ready for scuba diving :-( But even those 5-minutes were so thrilling that I have decided I will come back some time in my life and try it again. Here is a video of what the scuba dive would have looked like.
So anyways, I gave up on the scuba dive and went for the snorkel instead. The first trip was the guided snorkel in the protected lagoon area, where the water is about 30 feet deep. Here, an instructor will guide you around while you hang on to a life preserver. The scenery below the water was exquisite, with corals in the shapes of brains, balls, stag horns and many other shapes which I cannot name. I saw the large Wrasse (the big blue fish pictured above) and a big green sea turtle (crush), caught a moon jelly fish in my hand, saw an anemone with Clown fish inside, and countless types of fish such as parrot fish, blue tang, orange tang, banana fish to name a few. The corals were all sorts of colors, orange, green, purple.......It was a feast for the eyes.
This video is very close to our experience, as this was filmed in the enclosed area of reef magic.
Being a bit more adventurous ,I signed up for the adventure snorkel, that takes us out of the sheltered lagoon, into the open ocean for a 45-minute snorkel near the edge of the reef, where the huge drop-offs are and where giant schools of fish and sharks swim. A snorkel boat took us from the pontoon where our catamaran was moored and dropped us off in the middle of the ocean, from where it took us about 45 minutes to swim back to the pontoon.
This was even more incredible than the first one, where I got to experience those vistas one sees only on National Geographic or Animal Planet. There was a huge school of banana fish swimming in a long column, surrounded by larger tuna fish attempting to break the formation, and a shark swimming on the outer fringes. There were even more coral polyps in all different colors of the rainbow, large crevasses and deep gullies with giant mollusks that snap shut when touched, giant parrotfish staying absolutely still trying to lure prays, colonies of sea anemones with white and red clown fish darting in and out, a ray that was swimming lazily by....It was watching Finding Nemo in real life.....
Here are a couple of galleries of professional photographs that represent fairly accurately the pictures we might have taken, had we had an underwater camera and the time to think :-)
Finally, I am sooooooooooooooooooo glad amma and nanna sent me all the way to Vizag to get me swim lessons and Babai and pinni took time to take us to classes.............I would never have had this incredible opportunity if not for them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We were on a bus, going to Bondi beach. There was this kid sitting next to us. He is on vacation in Sydney. Was asking us where we were from. I told SFO. He was quite excited at meeting someone from US. Had lot of questions about McDonald's and Hollywood celebrities. Just before we were getting off, I gave him a few US coins.......his face lit up like a Christmas tree :-) I am sure I made his day.
After many false starts, we made it to Tirups this Monday &Tuesday. Amma joined us from Hyd on Sunday. We drove down (round trip : 600 KM in 2 days). Raghav and I got our gundus done and he cried a lot. The barber could have handled it better. We also had some trouble with accommodation, but Vijaya Pinni had asked Mr Ravi to help out and he found us a reasonable place to stay. The darsanam was good.
2 gundus
On the way back, we visited our old Tirups home...required a bit of hunting to find the place, but Amma persisted with gusto and tracked the place down. The lane looks so small now! The view of the mountain is gone (an apartment house is visible instead). Many of the trees were also gone. But it was still nice to see the old place.
