The hols are over, and classes are on their way back to routine (sometimes dreary routine). After a mostly wasted vacation stay at hostel, the time spent at home wasn't too bad… Well, at least, it wasn't as fruitless as the typical holiday. Just as always, there were grand plans, most of which never came to be. But life has taught me something about being content. I understand that there is little point in wasting the present thinking about time spent not so fruitfully in the past.

Well, all that said and done, the holidays weren't so bad at all. I spent a lot of it experimenting with Django and later drowning myself in documentaries (Through the Wormhole and Fabric of the Cosmos). Inspired by all the physics happening in the documentaries, I even went on an equation solving spree working out Maxwell's equations for a whole lot of interesting problems from the excellent book, "Electromagnetics" by John D. Kraus!

And then, I just had to do something crazy (read new/challenging) before I could consider myself sufficiently enriched by the holiday. And so, my brother and I went for a walk from my hometown of Nagercoil to Kanyakumari (a distance of around 18-20 km). Now, I do try to avoid motorised transport as much as I can in my day-to-day affairs and mostly walk my way to places. But still, 20 km was a new high for me, and I just had to know whether I was upto it! :-)

After all the awful places I've been to (Chennai tops that list), Nagercoil is quite a heavenly place. The road to Kanyakumari had good tree cover with the occasional pond and other water bodies providing good relief to the surroundings. Also, the breeze was refreshingly cool and eased maintenance of body temperature. The constant breeze ensured that I never actually sweated it out on the road. And that is pretty important on a long journey. Kanyakumari district is almost Kerala with all its coconut trees, and thanks to the roadside vendors, a refreshing tender coconut was never far away.

The first 10 km of the journey was pretty straightforward. There was nothing much out of the ordinary in that. But, with the balls of my feet beginning to hurt, and the persistent (but reasonably mild) sunshine starting to give me a little bit of a headache, will power started getting involved in the equation. But, in the end, the trick was to just soldier on, one step at a time, not thinking about the next step until you have made the present step.

After leaving Nagercoil at around 2.00 pm, we reached Kanyakumari at around 6.30 pm. There was wonderful scenery (the sunset and the mountains!) along the way. Sadly, it didn't occur to me to take too many pictures. The sheer instantaneous beauty seemed good enough. So, I don't really have pictures worth showing off, but at least for the sake of it, I have included a picture from the walk. So, that's about it for now. I'm looking forward to my next expedition to some other place, some other time. Perhaps a bicycle would be good! :-)