Getting safe water on Long Treks

Water is very essential during trekking, and neglecting that can cause serious dehydration. For short treks, you can carry most of the water you need for the entire journey in bottles. But for extended treks, this becomes more difficult, especially if camping or cooking is involved. Water is heavy, since a litre of it weighs a kilogram, it quickly overwhelms the carrier.

Water from natural sources like streams or by melting snow can be used for drinking and cooking purposes, however a few precautions are mandatory, to prevent unwanted diseases from drinking contaminated water.

The most effective of all these is to boil the water. The water need not actually boil for an extended period, just getting it to boil should suffice. This will render the water safe to drink. But this is also a complicated and time consuming procedure.

The other method is to buy Iodine beforehand at your local medical store. For a recent 3 day trek I bought BetaDine(R) iodine bottle for about Rs 113 at the local medical store. You can buy Tincture of Iodine also, but it has less concentration. It was a normal 100ml bottle, and can potentially clean hundreds of liters of water. Just add 8 drops of it to a liter of clear water, and wait for 30 mins for the iodine to kill most of the microorganisms. Iodine is not poisonous in higher doses, so you can safely increase the dosage without any side-effects. double the dosage, if you see visible contamination or if you want quicker response time. After 30 mins, there will be a slight after-taste to water due to iodine. I personally did not mind the taste, but for those of you who do, you can carry Vitamin C tablets. You must add them AFTER the 30 mins, otherwise iodine will not be effective (since the Vitamin C tablets convert iodine to iodide, removing the taste). I would suggest using iodine in normal water once before the trek to know clearly how you feel about the taste of it, and see if you need Vitamin C or not.

WARNING: Do NOT EXPOSE IODINE TO SUNLIGHT! It renders it ineffective!

Iodine tablets are also available I suppose, although I havent tried them.

I also suggest having a backup scheme to purify water, to prevent any unexpected incidents like the bottle accidentally getting exposed to sunlight or breaking.

Check out this link for more details on other water purification methods. Remember, by not carrying a lot of bottles, you are also not polluting the environment with plastic!

Trekking Essentials

Trying to go for a trek in the wilderness? Here is a list of the essentials you need to carry. Most of them will seem like overkill, but if an emergency happens you will be happy you have them! The list is incomplete, and I will be adding stuff regularly as I figure it out.

Navigational Aids:

1. Detailed and marked Map
2. Compass (optionally supplemented with a GPS receiver)
3. Cell Phone

Survival Aids:

1. Water proof Matches/Lighter with candles for easier starting
2. Flashlight
3. Knife
4. Rope
5. Cap/Hat
6. Water Purification tablets
7. Old News papers for Fire
8. Energy Bars
9. Jerkin/rain wear (against rain and cold)
10. Whistle (for communication if lost)
11. Local Enforcement official contact and details
12. Extra batteries (for flash light or camera)

Health Aids:
1. First aid kit
2. Sprain Band & Gauze
3. Sunglasses and sunscreen
4. Mosquito/Insect repellent
5. Disinfectant (For handwash)
6. Protection against Leeches

Comfort
1. Extra food and water containers
2. Extra clothes
3. Rain wear
4. Extra socks
5. Tissue paper
6. Wet Tissues

Miscelleneous/Entertainment:
1. Camera
2. Extra clothes

Treks with camping:
1. Tents
2. Sleeping bags/blankets
3. Campfire starting materials

Treks with substantial climbing:
1. Gloves
2. Shoes with proper grip
3. Bags with tight straps
4. tight clothing
5. Ropes
6. Pick axe

Trip to Nandi Hills

After a long vacation-less November, it was time for action again, and this time we decided to go visit Coorg near Bangalore during the weekend of Dec 6-7. However since the number of people got reduced to my friend - MJ, his wife - Sudha and myself, We had no option but to cancel the planned 2 day coorg trip and then instead planned on visiting Nandi Hills about 70 km from bangalore.

Since we felt a cab for 3 people was an overkill, we took my friend AJ's Pulsar 180, and Phani's Bajaj Discover to visit Nandi hills. We started at 1PM in the afternoon after having lunch at Swagruha near our friend's house. After travelling for 4 km on the Outer Ring Road, I was stopped by two cops. The Pulsar 180 is a Tamil Nadu registration vehicle, and my friend never actually paid the Karnataka state tax for it. So not having any kind of insurance/pollution certificate or tax reciept, he asked for a Rs 800 fine... or Rs 200 bribe :)). I paid the bribe and he warned me about more cops checking vehicles near the Hebbal flyover. I took heed to his warning and closely followed a lorry, and missed the bunch of cops who were stopping vehicles at the Hebbal Flyover.

Nandi hills is located about 40 km away from the newly constructed Bangalore International Airport (BIAL), and hence the road was a 6 lane one with a 80KMPH speed limit. The P180 was rearing to go and I cruised along, but not forgetting to check out for cops at the same time. We reached Nandi hills at 3:30 PM.

The place was extremely beautiful, although there were no clouds. We had a complete view of the place around. Nandi hills was actually a fort belonging to Tipu Sultan at one time. The rock formation was awesome, and we had a walk all around the place and took a ton of pics. We also took our trademark "in-the-air" pics, where we jump, and use a multi snap capture camera to take a series of photographs spaced about 300 ms from each other. The monkeys on the hill were a serious menace, with one trying to snatch a chips packet directly from my hand. and it would not scare at all.

We started back at 5:30PM from Nandi Hills, and it was almost 8:00 PM by the time I reached my friend's house, without any further brushes with the cops :)

How people feel about themselves...

In a standard departure from my normal posts about vacations/economics/linux, I have started writing about some philosophical insights too which struck me as so true... :)

I have found the weather man movie very insightful... and I liked one quote the best of all... I have modified it a bit, to make it more relevant... It never amazes me how much of this is true about how people feel....

"When we are young, we picture ourselves having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passes, few ever become any qualities that we actually have. And all the possibilities we face and the sorts of people we could be, all of them get reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they get reduced to one, to who you are. And that's who you are!"

So learn to live with yourself, stop pushing yourself too hard and be happy!

Overcomming blurred images in firefox

While using firefox, I recently noticed that most of the images are blurred and/or having artifacts all over. Initially I could not understand why this was happening even with new tabs. But it looks like when you zoom in, in firefox (using Ctrl +/- or the mouse wheel), it zooms images too. Also firefox "remembers" the zoom settings in some way, so that it applies for new tabs too. This is counter productive for me, since the main reason I zoom in is to read the text better, not for images.

So for those of you who want to disable this image zooming feature of firefox, go to View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text Only.

Its a trivial tip, but it changed my browsing experience for the better!

Waynad - Trip into God's Own Country

I heard a lot about Kerala being a very scenic place to visit, but could never visit it. So, last week, when my friend AJ who stays in Bangalore and is the cornerstone of all of my bangalore based trips like Bandipur, Mudigere, Shivanasamudram etc, mentioned he will be moving out of bangalore shortly, We decided to have one more trip. After throwing around a lot of names, Waynad stuck.

Located around 300KM from Bangalore in Kerala, Waynad is a popular and scenic hill station. So three of us - vamsi, praveen and myself - from Hyderabad booked tatkal tickets to bangalore. The train arrived late by two hours on Saturday morning at 8:30AM. We joined AJ and Balaji waiting in a Qualis, and started off to Waynad. After paying an RTO toll of Rs 600 at the Kerala-Karnataka border - which surprised us completely, we reached our Hotel in Kalpetta at 4:15. We then immediately left for the scenic Pookode Lake. Since we arrived there at 4:55, and boating in the lake closes at 5:00, we could not get a row boat ourselves, but had a tourism employee take us around the lake.


The employee, over chitchat, revealed that there would be treks to a nearby mountain peak daily, and we were tempted to cancel the next day plans completely and go for the trek. But he warned us that there would be leeches, but we did not care too much for them - how wrong we were! After getting off the boat, we roamed around the lake, and at one point my friend balaji and vamsi waded into a patch of water which was overflowing onto the path. Rest of us decided against it, and instead turned back. We went to the canteen and saw a group of people trying to get a leech off a guys leg using a pair of matches... Alarmed we immediately checked our own legs, and sure enough we found two leeches on Balaji's feet. It had sucked a decent amount of blood, and after removing them the blood would not clot, due to some anti-coagulant that the leech releases.

We rushed to the hotel room, and thoroughly cleaned ourselves, and vamsi who was wearing shoes, found two leeches on his sock, but which, luckily, could not penetrate the skin. After this rude jerk, we decided that tomorrow's trek was a lost cause. We then had a beer followed by dinner, and played cards until 12:30AM and then went to bed.

Next day morning at 8:30AM we visited the nearby Banasura Sagar Dam, and then went on a speed boat ride around it. Then we went to a supposedly scenic view point, but it was covered in complete clouds and had a visibility range only a couple of meters - leaving us staring into the whiteness. Finding nothing interesting in the vast whiteness, we started off to Soochipara waterfalls.

After reaching the place, we had to climb down a lot of steps to reach the base of the water fall. It was a very picturesque scene, and the water fall was in full force due to the recent monsoon. It is basically a 3 stage waterfall. After playing around on the rocks for some time, we then took a different set of steps to reach the 2nd stage of the water fall. We could not get close to it, but it was breathtaking. Later we went to another path to a view point. It was almost 4:30 PM by the time we reached the parking lot again. We decided we did not have time to visit the Edakkal caves which close at 5PM.

After buying a couple of souvenirs, We then started back to the hotel and freshened up. Later at around 7PM we started the long journey back to Bangalore. On the way back our Qualis hit a big bump in the road, and one of the tyre's rim got bent, and started hitting the disk brake. So we had to replace the tyre and were back on our way. It was almost 2PM by the time we reached bangalore.

Overall it was a very nice trip, with a lot of interesting experiences. I am looking forward to visit the rest of Kerala some time soon.

Irritating defaults in Linux Applications

If there is one thing that Linux/Unix applications are famous for, other than being open source - it is the irritating defaults they set. And just when you figured out how to disable the most irritating ones, you upgrade to a newer version, and they flood you with even more irritating defaults.

Vim takes the prize in this behavior. Every time I upgrade my Fedora, I get a new version of vim, and while I stopped finding any actual improvements between the vim I used 7 years ago and now, the new set of irritating defaults gets me. After upgrading to Fedora 9, with Vim 7.1, this struck me again.

While writing a piece of C code, the program keeps highlighting matching braces, whenever my cursor passes over them. This is mightly irritating, and I could not think of one good reason for making this the default behavior. I am a hardcore programmer and I know where the F*** match for that brace is!!! And the worst part was figuring out what the offending setting was. I tried googling for it, but it was difficult, since the normal terms like "brace", "bracket", "highlight", "show brace", "show match" did not turn up any results about the offending behavior.

Then it struck me that I was searching with the wrong terms, and put in "vim irritating brace" into google and presto! there were tons of forums where people like me were bitching about that behavior. The answer to turn off the feature is to add this to your .vimrc file

let loaded_matchparen=1

Long way to go... before ppl stop messing around with defaults.. Linux is no longer just a programmer's system, but an end-user system. Not every one would like to spend hours trying to figure out why something has changed since their last upgrade... the sooner the linux developers realize this, the better.