Tourist Attractions and Places near Pune and Mumbai

We had been to the adventure plus resort last monsoon as part of our team event. We went on a 2-day package with an overnight stay. Along with a colleague, i went on a weekend to see the place for ourselves before taking the decision to go there. We were impressed by the place and decided to take our team there for the weekend. This is a detailed review of the place/activities based on our visit.

For those not interested in a long review, here is a shorter version of it. You get your money’s worth of activities at this place. I have not seen many places with such a wide range of activities at this nominal price. Compared to the other adventure resorts like the ones in Lonavala, the price adventure plus charges is peanuts. Imagine being able to do wall climbing, rappelling, Burma Bridge, Obstacle race, Rifle Shooting, Archery, Kayaking (Many charge a lot of money for just kayaking) and more PLUS lunch for around 700-800 rupees. This is as best a deal as you can get.

Now, the detailed review.

The place: Adventure Plus is located around 55 kms from Pune (Magarpatta City) near Bhor (on the road which goes through Bhor and Varandha Ghat). It would take around 1-1.5 hrs to reach the place if you avoid Pune city traffic. On the NH4 towards bangalore, you would see a left turn for Narayanpur Balaji Temple. Around a 100 ms beyond that, a small road goes to the right. This is the one which takes you to Bhor and Varandha Ghat. Adventure plus is located around 12 kms down this road. Watch out for this view on the left as you drive down this road. It is great during the monsoons.

The various Activities along with my rating. Please bear in mind that this rating is purely my individual opinion. What i rate as 1/5 may be the most thrilling thing for you and what i rate as 5/5 may be as boring as watching Shah Rukh on Zor Ka Jatkha!

Archery (4/5). It was easy and fun. The equipment was in good condition and each of us had 5 shots at the target. Rifle Shooting (3/5). The gun used was much better than the ones you see in the amusement fairs. The bullets were small ball bearings, so you really cant make out where they hit on the target, just that they hit the target based on the sound you hear.

Burma Bridge (Adventure plus called this Rope Bridge) (4/5). This is great fun if you are doing it for the first time. If you are scared of heights, it adds to the fun. You have to cross a section tied together by ropes. You are safe as you are held on by a safety rope, but it is fun to walk on a swaying bridge of rope. One guy started swaying so much that the bridge overturned. Of course, nothing happened to him. He was just hanging upside down from the bridge!

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written by Rajaram S \\ tags: adventure

Are you going to the Bryan Adams Concert? I had been to one of his shows in Cyprus few years back and it was amazing. If you still haven’t got your tickets, here are the details.

Tickets can be obtained at all State bank of India branches in Pune or directly at the Amanora office in Amanora town. The show is on 11th Feb starting around 6pm at the Amanora Entertainment Arena. The tickets are priced at Rs 2000,Rs 3500, Rs 6000 and Rs 10000.

If you are going to the concert, i am sure that you would want to come back with great photographs. I am not too sure that cameras would be allowed into the arena, but the crowd and probably some sweet talk should enable you take in the camera. If you do manage to take in your camera, follow the simple tips listed below to get the best out of the opportunity.

• Avoid using Compact Cameras, the point and shoot type. They are slow to start up, slow between photographs and have a shutter-lag. Even the latest point and shoot cameras suffer from these drawbacks. If you want good photographs, go the SLR way. Better still, go for a digital SLR so that you can immediately check whether the photo you captured is good enough for your liking.
• Use High ISO. Most of the concerts would have sections of the stage well-lit, but the rest of the area would be dark. There will always be some kind of a spotlight on the artistes on stage. But this light is not enough to get a good exposure. So, use a higher ISO to get a good picture in spite of the little light. Avoid ISO 1600 as it can get too grainy. But, take many practice shots to get the exposure you like. A high ISO would help you get photographs like the one below where you can see the lights from the all the mobile phone cameras in use.

  

• Use Shutter Priority Mode. I have had good success with Shutter Priority mode on many low-lit situations. You can customise the shutter speed based on your capability to hold the camera still. Using the program mode will make the camera try to get the best possible picture and in most cases (for concerts), the shutter will be opens for many seconds! Override this and use shutter priority. The Big Ben photo below was shot from a running open-top bus. I used a shutter speed of around 1/20s (don’t remember exactly) and ISO 1200.

  

• Use a Zoom Lens, unless you are a good friend of the rockstar and manage to get a seat on the stage. Of course, not having a zoom lens would give a different perspective of the concert like the first photo below. I carried both the 18-70 and the 70-300 lenses with me and i switched them from time to time to take different views. From the first photo, you can kind-of guess where i was seated – far away from the stages and yet, with the zoom lens (and some cropping), I managed to get some decent close-ups of Bryan Adams.

  

• Don’t use Matrix Metering. If you don’t understand what I am saying, then it is time you take out your manual and look up on this. Matrix metering will work for many landscape shots but will mostly fail in concert shots where a small section is brightly lit and the rest are almost pitch-dark. Switch to Spot Metering and meter for the person whom you want to take (if you want to get the rockstar in focus).

  

• Obviously, Flash is useless. Ok, in some situations I am wrong. When you want to take a photo of yourself standing in front of the dimly-lit stage, you need to switch to the night-portrait mode or if you don’t have one, manually enable the flash so that you are also well-lit. But, in other situations when you want to take the photo of a far-away rockstar on a stage, a flash is useless as it can light up, probably a few feet away from you. Worse still, if you have any object close to you, it will show up in your photograph in deathly-white. When i was in egypt, i had been to the sound-and-light show at the pyramids (first photo below). At that time, i had the “relatively ordinary” Nikon Coolpix 2500. I put in on a tripod, disabled the flash and let the camera decide its own exposure and I got pretty decent pictures. There were people around me pointing their cameras at the pyramids and shooting in auto mode with the flash. All they would have got is the chair in front of them with a white colouring!

  

Even if you follow these tips, you might not get it right the first time. So, practice a lot (another reason to move to Digital-SLR cameras) when the local artist comes on stage before the main act. Find the correct exposure (shutter speed/ISO) needed to get a decent image of the rockstar.

Hope you find these tips useful. Feel free to add more in the comments. Would also love to hear about your shooting experiences in music concerts.

written by Rajaram S

Once upon a time, there existed the Katraj Snake Park. Then, slowly the park expanded it horizons by bringing in other animals and expanded into the Rajiv gandhi zoologicl park also known colloquially as the Katraj Zoo. The zoo also has a lake within it premises.

Route to go to the Pune Zoo (From Magarpatta): Go to the Solpur road, keep going towards Swargate, at the swargate signal, turn left towards Katraj. Keep going straight. After a while (a long while), you should see the zoo on your left.

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Go to the Pune Zoo only under the following conditions:

• If you have never been to any half-decent zoo before. One can literally count the number of animals in the zoo.
• If you want to have your morning walk/jog in the presence of few dozen deers. With an entrance fee of 5 rupees, it is the best bet for a good run amongst a bit of greenery. Of course, avoid anytime after the mornings, as the place gets thronged with whoever has 5 rupees change in the pocket.
• If you love to see deers and more deers. The ratio of deers to other animals is around 92.5 to 1. Maybe, other animals were obtained under special packages such as buy a tiger, get 20 deers free.
• If you want to test the limit of your big zoom lens or to test your ophthalmologist’s claim that you can identify objects at farway distances after your recent eye operation. I have a 200 mm lens and it proved to be extremely difficult to get decent shots of the animals. It is easy to recognise animals if they move around. Imagine a bear lying still around a 100 m away..Half the crowd was playing a trasure hunt trying to spot the location of the bear in the compound. This is the first zoo i have seen where the elephant is kept around half a km away from the viewing area. We could get to see the trunk and tail of the elephant (at least that is what we thought those were!)
• if you are studying any course in design and want to get examples of how not to design things. The design of the pune zoo is a marvel in itself. When you enter the zoo, you can either turn right or left. On the left, you will find monkeys, snakes and other smaller creatures. The board towards the right says “Elephant” prominently. Akshara is very fond of elephants and hence we turned right. Bad decision!  We walked on for almost 200 metres and were yet to come across the first animal/cage! The road on the right goes past lot of enclosures for almost 1.5 kms. Each enclosure is at least a 100 m apart and every second enclosure has deers. Unfortunately, the elephant was the last. But, we were ok. Akshara didnt seem to mind seeing a deer every second second! Then came the bad news! The only way to get back to the start/gate of the zoo was to walk back the entire 1.5 kms as the road finished at the lake and it looked like swimming across the lake was not an option. Maybe, the zoo authorities wanted to ensure that you didnt miss any deer. This proved to spoil the day as my parents. already tired from the long walk had to now walk back. There was mini-tram service and that looked to provide an easy way. But, this was not a hop-on-hop-off service. It took a group of people around the zoo and then took them back. With just a few trams and few hundred people, the waiting time at the start is something not worht mentioning.

Some photographs from our trip.

Akshara didn’t seem to mind, as there was always some animal to watch and she was being carried or driven around in a pram.

But, even in such a zoo, i found few takeaways. There were boards kept near many enclosures which explained the roots of the names of animals and also the differences between antelopes/deers and turtles/tortoises. The difference between turtles and tortoises was a cool thing to know.

There is also the boating facility on the katraj lake. Surprisingly, there were no life jackets or life guards around.

The highlight of the zoo was this enclosure which had graves for the dodo and the Indian Cheetah and a proposed one for the Tiger. The message was strong and direct. I stayed next to this place for a fewminutes and it was funny listening to the comments of people ranging from “Oh, this must be the place where they bury dead animals” to “Oh, a tiger died recently?”.

written by Rajaram S