The first was only a day trip on Sunday, not really far but as Peter hadn't seen anything yet we just took a short trip to Nandi Hills. Nice place to get some feeling for the Indian history and culture without going far.
This gives some of the landscape as from the top you have a nice look around. Next to that there is a very old temple that gives a good impression of Indian temples.
According Wikipedia:
Bhoga Nandeeshwara Temple (Kannada: ಭೋಗ ನಂದೀಶ್ವರ ದೇವಾಲಯ) (also spelt "Bhoga Nandishwara" or "Bhoga Nandishvara") is a Hindu temple located in Nandi village, at the base of Nandi Hills (or Nandidurga) in the Chikkaballapur district of Karnataka state, India. It is dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva.
For me this was my second trip to the place, first one with some more capabilities in the camera, with extender to my longest sense I come to 400 mm. But turned out to be very valuable this time.
We left Saturday morning early this time taking a drive instead of driving myself.
Breakfast on the way as we started around 7 am. Smooth ride brought us there around 13:00.
Mysore Road is not really an interesting road to take so nothing special from there.
Stay was nice having two roams next to each other with view on the lake, little bit disguised by the trees.
The evening safari was with the jeep. On the way in we learned that it was a sad day as one of the officers of the park was killed by an elephant when he was trying to take out a fire.
For us it started with a lot of Monkeys and Deer. For us still special but for the others "hunting" for the large animals not really. So we stopped once or twice but not really having good opportunities to catch nice photos.
The first catch was the Sambar, which is a deer.
Next real thing was three elephants, coming out of the bushes at a small pond to drink. Although I had seen in the mean time several of them it is still impressive to meet them.
Then slowly we saw on our right a leopard walking. not good to see in the shade but still a real catch.
Waiting for some more time he/she felt comfortable enough to just cross the road in front of us giving a good view through beautiful sunshine.
Nice and quite evening, windy but a good place to sleep, not late as the next morning would be an early rise for the morning Safari by boat.
The morning gave us a complete different view on the environment as it was foggy. Only small set of people from our lodge and a set from a lodge on the other side. Still wondering what the route was as we noticed on the way back that they were closer than estimated on the way to them.
No real catch this morning although it was a very interesting experience.
Almost got sick as there was no orientation possible at all even with a very calm river/lake.
But also learned a lot of the challenges of taking photos in the fog with no sun behind it. Grey with quite some noise I would say for a lot of the pictures.
Still some nice shots including a big crocodile.
For the full set of photos from the Safari see the Kabini photo page.