Bannerghatta-Shivanahalli and some trees that were planted

Date: 11th July 2010

Place: Bannarghatta - Shivanahalli (en route to Jigani)

Route: Drive upto the point of entry to Bannerghatta national park. At that point it is a junction, take a left. Roughly 2 kms down, take a right - easily missable, but u should be able to spot people standing

there waiting for buses. This is near the Ragihalli gate. Once you get onto this right, its one straight road , including 5kms through the reserve forest where you can spot elephants and birds.

What we saw: Elephants, Birds - bee eaters, some predators, Malkhoa, Coucals, Babblers

We got this invitation from Ganesh who heard about a "tree-planting" exercise through his grapevine.

So a bunch of us set off in different vehicles towards the Ramakrishna Ashram in Shivanahalli.

We (Jey and Smi) set off at 630-ish from wheeler road. Stopped at Adigas near Wockhardt for a quick bite and drove towards the Bannerghatta zoo. We made our way towards Shivanahalli, but realized that we were very early and so did a couple of back and forths in the reserve area stretch. Here we spotted some interesting birds...

After a while though, we started seeing traffic on the road and figured people were converging towards the tree planting event, and we too headed that way.

Once we got there, we were served good idlis for breakfast after which we set out lead by the iownatree and rotary club sponsors, on a trek behind the ashram.

We reached the place where we saw a bulldozer (or some such equipment) creating holes. And we started planting the saplings...

After three odd hours, we finished and were told that we could move back for lunch, which again was surprisingly delicious. Or it could be that the manual labour had made us hungry!

All done, we got a debrief and came back home, sated and feeling like we had contributed to a better tomorrow!!!

Why this blog?

Well, it just so happened that a bunch of us spent sunday together doing some productive stuff near Bangalore. And thar did not involve sitting in front of the television or lazing around.

And one of us had a question - if we are busy doing something or the other over the weekends, how do we remember what we did on each such ocassion?

Hence the idea of the blog. The purpose is threefold.
1. Record our "worthy" weekend escapedes for posterity
2. Provide similar-minded people with ideas on what to do for weekends based on our own weekends, or any useful information that we identify
3. Use this as a forum to post any community events happening so that we reach out to a larger population

And since this is not a one time effort, or the ideas of a single individual, this is a team blog. We hope to expand the contributor list as we go along. Cheers!