04/Apr/2026

The fundamental problem with traveling is that wherever you go you still have to take yourself.

My relationship with travel has changed substantially over the years. When I started traveling for and by myself circa 2009, I really wanted every journey to be the journey, the third act montage in which the hero transforms. Repeated disappointments have made me realise that nothing as radical will happen ever and yet, and yet, I'm aukath se majboor. So this time too a part of me perked up as Tasmania's shore came into sight. Stories by Bob Brown, Richard Flanagan, David Hunt, Don Watson among others started glowing brighter in my head, beckoning me, luring me, playing with my (once intense) search for my karmabhoomi. Unfortunately nothing so far this time too. So here's my more prosaic recounting of the day.

I'm very glad we booked an afternoon flight because it took us that long to get everything ready and get going. Dharanivadu woke up at 7.30 AM so we assumed she was going to nap after security at 1. No chance. She went bonkers at the airport, overstimulated and cranky, not eating much and refusing to sleep. And to add to our luck the flight was delayed by an hour and a half. (There was good luck too because Sravani could get her sunglasses fixed and eat Ra Ra). It took full-time caring from both of us through the journey- but crying was only for brief durations. Otherwise she was waving at people, crawling all over, calling random white girls akka, blowing kisses and waving hi's to strangers. Then sudden outbursts of screaming and acting out; the understanding, indulgent smiles we both got. Gosh, the embarassment. Thankfully she didn't seem to have issues during take-off or landing, and turned into a sweetheart once we landed. Hobart airport is endearingly small, and the moment we walked out we got extreme Queenstown vibes. Not just because of the size but also because of the similar mountain-surrounded landspace. Perhaps because we're on the same latitude? In a few minutes we got our rental car and then drove the 20 kms or so to Rydges. This was around 6.30 PM and there was a definite chill in the air despite the light being late afternoon-ish. The houses in the city are spread across the surrounding hills, not too sparse but not too dense either, and we crossed the lovely Tasman bridge, which I could see from the flight, to come to this part of the city. The highlight of the day, as Sravani just pointed out, is that DN finally got conked out in the car on the way to the hotel. It was an unbelievable never before ever after because she's never slept in the car in all these months. Poor bugger must've been really tired. Anyway, we checked-in into this motel-esque hotel, quick call with Amma, and then rushed out to the Woolies in Eastlands to stock up on Noorigadi food. Both of us noticed the many desis (Nepalis predominantly from the looks of it), and this part of the city reminded us of Dubbo and parts of suburban Adelaide. Noori had fun walking around the supermarket, smiling and waving at people, and getting "She's so pretty" comments, before we stopped for dinner at a pizza place called Local Pizza for some lovely truffle pizza- made by desi chefs playing O Rangrez and Ajj din Chadeya. Back to the room, Dhara's quick shower, feed- during which she thankfully dozed off, us deciding to go to Port Arthur tomorrow and as I finish today's entry beginning to feel sleepy. Thank goodness for daylight savings, I hope to sleep for an extra hour tomorrow. Conditional on beti ki mehrbaani.

05/Apr/2026

Travelers go out in search of stories; And stories are created for an audience.

Christopher McCandless' story had a very big impact on my formative years. Perhaps there's a direct link between watching the film and reading the book Into the Wild in 2009 and seeking out WOTR-esque experiences a year later. I felt like I was going in search of myself if you know what I mean. Bombay, Karim Nagar, Tirupati, Ahmednagar|Darewadi|Wanzulshet, Amangal|Atmakur and, then eventually, Bangalore were romanticised in my head while I was doing them because of that film and others like it. I felt I was going to find myself along the way. And I've carried that mentality, ebbing and flowing admittedly but nevertheless always there, till this Tassie trip. I look at every new place desperate for a vision, for that all-illuminating epiphany; And if not that then atleast for a story I can regale others with. The ridiculousness of the belief I've carried all along that I'm doing this for myself would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid and sad. I tell myself I'm looking for a home, this magical place where I can finally sink my roots and start building. Where the demons in my head can be put to rest. What demons? Confusion, shallowness, signalling, inauthenticity, discomfort. Its good listing this stuff out because it helps me see clearly the flimsiness of that mirage. I want a place to deliver me from all friction, and I told myself I won't truly start living until I find it. No wonder I flit between euphoria and despondence so frequently. The anticipation, the promise, the prayer versus the toy house dream punctured by an unexpected event, the eruption of weeds in the manicured mental garden, the dawn of new desires. That place doesn't, and infact shouldn't, exist. Or it does and we call it death. To live is to throb with unrequited desire, to want more and get it and ask for more and fail and fall and go back to asking for more. I'd been in search of narratives to assuage my insufficiencies, to not just quieten that voice in my head but also perform infront of my home supporters. I wanted to be a celebrity and a celebrity always is looking for an audience. I am because you are. To then pretend that I can live without people, that I want to live without people in some pure realm is both disingenuous and futile. That's perhaps why I wasn't looking forward to this trip as much. Because in the last few months I've found a nice rhythm with my intellectual life, and didn't have that craving for cheap thrills.

Noori woke me up around 6.30 and I tried patting her back to sleep for a few minutes but to no avail. Then called Sravani back, who'd gone for a walk, and the moment she entered she exclaimed, "She pooped can't you smell it?". It was a big, smelly, wet poop similar to yesterday so we were a little concerned but Dhara looked her normal self. After coffees and MONA bookings for tomorrow and her brekkie trials, a quick stop at Woolies, we went to this brekkie cafe called Room for a Pony where I had a terrific Rwandan Batch Brew (I can practically taste the fruity hops on my tongue even now). Then onto Port Arthur which was an hour-ish drive through which Dharani mostly slept. The landscape was reminiscent of our drive to Mt Cook/ Tasman Glacier in South Island New Zealand except maybe the water wasn't as azure. We spent a few hours at the convict heritage site, including a small ferry ride around the Isle of Dead, and I mapped the stories we were reading there with my readings around Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy. Oh yeah, we bumped into one of Payal Anna's friends there. We would've liked to stay for a little longer but Sravani felt Dharani was gettinh hungry-sleepy, so after trying to feed her some Pumpkin Soup there, we started our drive back. One of the main currants of our conversation today why don't we do more hiking-type travel more, and deciding that we must with Sneha|Bhavish soon. On the way back we stopped at the Tasmanian Chocolate Foundry, decided to skip the Tasmanian Devil Unzoo, and sought out a specific Fish & Chips truck at Eaglehawk Neck. Then we stopped briefly at the Tasman Arch in who's search I stumbled across an even better viewpoint that reminded me of the long walk we did when we went to Narooma with Bhajji|Priyanka. Then we took the more scenic, hilly route back to the hotel. All day we saw tens of roadkill, most looked like wallabies, and I felt a stab in my heart at the sighting of a carcass. Its a total surprise to me that I'm not a vegan. Even if I stop for 5 seconds and think of the animal suffering behind so many human actions, I know I can't drink milk or eat meat or wear leather. Back in the room Sravani made sweet potato rice and curd rice, but DN probably at best ate 3 muddalu. Then I did some timepass on Domain looking for upscale houses in Hobart and we ended up seeing a couple in Sandy Bay. Not too cheap at 1.5 million or so but a similar house in a comparable location in Sydney must be going upwards of 3 million I suppose. We had dinner at Bangkok City in the CBD, doing our best to wolf it down as Noori refused to eat but incessantly yawned before driving back to the room at ~8.40, bathing her, and the feeding her. Both of them have slept as I sit out in the hall and write this after talking to Amma.

06/Apr/2026

Travel is nature's way of saying fake it for now so that you can go back home and try to make it.

If only we could bottle up the inspiration we feel during travel so that we could take it back home and fill the deadening routine with a bit of zing. There's two reasons its not possible: When we're traveling we're way more lax with our dollar than we're usually wont simply because we are happy to throw money at a problem if we can live aadamarichi like this. More interestingly, our vacation persona is not the same as our regular persona. The vacation persona is more unencumbered, more prone to irrational decisions than in our day to day. I guess because we timebox our vacations in our head, we feel like we can allow ourselves to be less mature in our decisions here. As if the actions made here won't have effects once we're back home. While that can lead us down batcrap crazy paths, they can, and do, also lead us to serendipitous discoveries that we can build upon and conversations/ encounters in which we surprise even ourselves. A big chunk of being a contemporary person is creating a fairly stable, accountable identity and adhering to it. Pejoratively I'd call it being the right cog in the global economic machine. But I also think considering how interconnected/ interdependent we're now as individuals of this species that its both necessary and inevitable that our world find us predictable and reliable enough to build on. Vacations offer us a respite from that roleplaying. Yesterday, at the Port Arthur gift shop, I saw a little keychain with a sad-faced prisoner and instead of smiling at the whimsy, I recoiled at the ability of modern capitalism to turn something as tragic as people, including many children, in thousands being shipped halfway across the world for minor crimes into a little piece of carry-able merch. And that feeling was compounded by the use of the thylacine as emblem for the chocolate factory and being sold in its merch. Here's the tragedy of a species extinction caused by humans and I spent a few minutes there thinking if I should buy a pin or a mug with its image. So to better understand the industry, and my own complicity, I spent a few minutes on the internet and found this book called The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class by Dean Maccannell. I intend to pick it up soon.

We wanted to start early today because we'd booked the ferry to go to MONA at 10.15. So after getting ourselves and Noori ready, who poor thing had two loose, stinky poos even before we started, we hit the road by 8.50. That gave us enough time to go to this coffee shop Sravani had the on the list called Six Russell Bakes and boy was their croissant terrific. Then we parked at the Marketplace Parking and walked on the Franklin Wharf to the Brooke Pier for the ferry. The 20 minute ride was lovely, it was a gorgeous day to be out on water, and the first impression we got on arriving at the MONA was the outdoor museum we saw en route to Mt Fuji. Inside was pretty okay, one molten steel exhibit was the particular highlight and the additional money paid to a James Turrell exhibit was sheer waste, and I was constantly reminded of Tokyo's Team Planets and 21 21, except that this was their less interesting cousin trying to overcompensate by half-clever marketing. The day, though, was massively reclaimed by our lunch at their restaurant called FORA where the modern cuisine we ate was an absolute blast. We ordered 4 dishes and I enjoyed every bite. After brief phone calls to home, we took the ferry back and DN dozed off feeding. On the wharf I spotted this old-school schooner and I showed off my recently gained, miniscule ship knowledge (learnt from or because of Ibis Trilogy) and my heart skipped at the prospect of spending 8 days on the vessel courtsey the Windward Bound charity. After a brief stop at the hotel, we rushed up to Mount Wellington and reached the summit as the final embers of light were dying out. As warned, the summit was maybe 8-10 degrees colder than the ground, it was almost dark and we could stay only a couple of minutes, but it looked like it belonged to an older era and tugged at my heart so much so that I now wish to climb it on foot one day. We stopped for dinner at another one of Sravani's picks, a burger joint called Mister Billy's, quite mediocre, and then back to the room, DN routine, and now I'm finishing today's entry before a quick call with Amma and winding down early for checkout and heading to Bruny tomorrow.

07/Apr/2026

It's semiotics all the way down.

We are a symbol making, parsing, transacting, interpreting, and misinterpreting species.

I've been in Tassie for 4 days now and I'd be hardpressed to tell you about one place I've explored with focus and depth. Ofcourse it becomes doubly complicated with a baby but most of the thought has gone into visiting places to tick them off and ensuring I have enough video clips for the film I intend to make (which ofcourse is highly doubtful until its done). Admittedly we're driving long distances to get to places but I'm shocked to pause and consider my behaviour- spending hours to get to somewhere only to spend less than five minutes there, and that's particularly true for Mt. Wellington and Bruny Lighthouse. To be fair we reached those places as darkness was falling and we didn't want to drive with DN in complete darkness on these country roads, and the 'doing the drive' was the big part of the assignment, but it definitely feels like an exercise in name-checking. Which brings me to another aspect of this-ish trips for me: Sravani tells me I romanticise rural life, camping, wilderness etc. precisely because I've never lived and truly experienced them; I'll take it further and admit that my fascination is totally that of a towny dick, and I place it so highly on my prisitinity ladder primarily because I can't parse it. All my life I've spent in an urban cultural landscape, and that has equipped me to have more intense complex relationships with, say, art, commerce, technology, the outback is my Lacanian Unconscious; Or is it the Symbolic? I'm so deracinated that I want to desparately claim a piece of virgin land to sink my roots into but when I think about it, I realise that there is no "virgin land" per se, and even if it exists, I don't have the capability to grow there. Yet its allure is too captivating and every time I'm in a trip like this, I dream of camping/ kayaking/ hiking and the like, despite not really having enjoyed it when I've tried them. My happy place is the film theatre, the library, the cafe and yet I'm not able to accept and find acceptance there. I wonder why?

Today morning we checked out of Rydges Hobart and had breakfast in this cafe called Sisterhood- pretty below average. Then we drove to Kettering and waited for an hour and a half to board the ferry to cross the d'Entrecasteaux Channel and arrive at Bruny. I first learnt of Bruny in a book I picked up years ago on another trip (in KI I think) called The Last Lighthouse Kepper by Johns Cook and Bauer. I found the tough life depicted in it almost tapasu like, and had been meaning to visit both Bruny and Maatsuuyker since then. After briefly stopping at Get Shucked for Sravani to try Oysters, we arrived at this farm stay in South Bruny. The place is tiny but warm and the hosts, Rachel and Ben, took us around their farm telling us of the travails and joys of working on their 100 acre plot. Needless to say Noori charmed them immensely as we did the rounds; For their part they showed their quails and she clapped in joy. On learning that their son was a blacksmith specialising in knives, Sravani was excited to chat with him- they discussed Japanese knives while I tried to keep Dharani away from all the sharp tools in the shed- and bought a lovely looking cheese knife. Then we drove the 45 minutes to the Bruny Lighthouse, as bushshi slept in the car, after a brief stop at a lovely spot Sravani saw, and I spent a couple of minutes looking at the actual sea cliffs that adorned that particular book. We drove back, discussing ownership and what it meant to both us, and then Sravani made Rampandu dinner which ofcourse she didn't eat, and then quickly finished our dinner, put her to sleep, and as I finish this I want to go back to reading Walter B. Pridmore's Van Diemen's Land to Tasmania (1642-1856) that I found in the lovely, little library in this house- Other interesting titles include Norweigian Wood and The Web of Meaning. I need to get my phone charger from the car but I'm afraid there's a wallaby out on the porch. Er, I think I'm going to skip charging tonight.

08/Apr/2026

Sublime is to be found where prospects of exuberance and fear intersect.

I have always searched for transcendence. A few years ago, in my ACT class, I learnt of the Edmund Burke quote where he states the above. Remove the aspect of horror and one removes the possibility of sublimity. All modern advertising, be it of a product, service, or experience, promises transcendence while corralling the experience within a safe, sanitised framework. (That explains why corporate sponsored art exhibitions are so tame; They can't truly afford to ruffle feathers.) That is why even an activity as perilous and mindboggling as skydiving eventually feels so lame. There's an almost 0% chance nothing will happen to me. I know it, that's why I do it. Problem is everyone else knows it too, so not only does it rob it of its signalling power but also its capacity to truly affect you. Gillian Flynn has this terrific passage in Gone Girl where a character says the world feels so disenchanting because we have been primed by every Hollywood movie and commercial to feel a certain way under in most situations (Soumya Sen's "Feels like Garden State man" then becomes such a pithy compression of the mental state). Our minds have been preblown. And yet I don't fully agree with Venkat when he acts snobbish towards Metamodernism. We need to find reenchantment. It may not be in the twee fashion of bead-wearing, yoga-talking hippies or city-bred hipsters going gaga over homemade guac. But it must be done- I'd argue his World Machines Project is exactly an attempt at that. All theorisation is. For those of us who aren't primed towards endurance records or adventure sports, intellectual summit scaling/ open sea chasing is an option.

Left the farm today at about 9:40 and reached Adventure Bay for the Adventure Cruise. Decked and ready by 10.45 and got into these 40 people boats by 11. We took the last seats because we weren't sure how Noori would fare in the open waters with chilly winds blowing and it turned out to be a smart decision. She dozed off in about 5 minutes, snug and warm in Sravani's arms and slept for about 2:45 minutes. Our ride was beautiful, it was a gorgeous day to be out in the sea, the sky this beautiful shade of clear blue that I've noticed at the roaring forties, and the water a squint-inducing blue gold. We sailed past the eastern coast of South Bruny, stopping every few minutes for brief guide stories, unique feature spottings, and photo ops. I dozed off last night reading a book about the European discovery of Tassie/ Bruny, and it helped me imagine a bit of how these shores must have looked to Tasman, Cook, Flinders et al hundreds of years ago. What madness must drive a man to sail into unknown open waters in search of all kinds of treasures. The frairs was the highlight- what with their seal colony, the one mountain islands giving the impression of floating triangles, and the beginning of Southern Ocean leading to Antarctica. On our way back we spotted quite a few albatrosses (albatrii?), including apparenly one species endemic to Australia, and their swooping and sailing was a joy to behold even to my absent-minded, roaming-elsewhere mind. On our return we stopped briefly at a raspberry farm and then at house of whiskey in northern Bruny before heading back south for a meal at the Bruny Hotel which had gorgeous views of the evening sea from its windows. Dharani grew visibly tired on our way back, and so we returned by 7-ish, and while both of them doze off, I spent sometime catching up on the news and Insta shit before making today's entry.

09/Apr/2026

There are days when there's a deep desire, and it makes perfect sense, to allow myself to become a stereotype. It goes without saying that being a square peg in a round hole chafes a lot. But then there are also days when despite me being myself, with all my jagged idiosyncracies, every new experience seems to perfectly fit in. And on those days, boy, is the struggle so worth it, the vindication so sweet.

There's a particular way Dharani says Nanna these days- a very unique sounding, full-mouthed nonnaw. And I can't communicate the thrill I feel every single time I hear it, the little electric jolt it gives me. I know she'll probably say it a few hundred times more, maybe a thousand if I'm lucky, and then she'll move on and forget she ever said something like this. But I hope I won't forget. There is already so much, of our 16 months with her, that we seem to have forgotten Sravani and I keep telling each other every few weeks. Currently in this stage the way she says "Uh-Oh", the way Sravani taught her, when she falls down while walking, or her insistence on stopping for everyone walking past us to stop and wave, the way she giggles when we're tickling her in bed, the way she holds my fingers when I'm wearing her in the carrier- I wish I could store all of it somewhere but I know I won't be able to, somehow can't for that's not how memory seems to work. She will grow to be 3, 5, 11, one day yell at us that we're "ruining her life" or implore why we hate her, slamming the door on our faces, and then too, once the anger and the hurt dissipates, we will keep coming back to these days, telling ourselves that its her age, that ofcourse she doesn't mean it, that somehow the real her is the one now who cries when one of us steps out of her sight for a couple of minutes. But ofcourse all of them is our daughter and I'll have it no other way.

We checked out of the South Bruny AirBnB at around 8.40 and headed to the lighthouse. Since reading John Cook's memoir I've been meaning to visit the place and it felt like a bit of a closure standing at the lighthouse and actually touching its whitewashed walls. The views were spectacular undoubtedly but I also felt a bit of melancholic desolation I'm wont to when in sight of the Southern Ocean. Then after brief stops at the Chocolate Factory and the heart-wrenchingly sad but commonplace Aboriginal story post Brit arrival Truganini memorial on the Bruny Neck, and a brief Noori meltdown session later, we headed straight onto the ferry to Kettering. There following our Airbnb host Ben's suggestion, we turned left and took the coastal road from Woodbridge, Gordon, Cygnet, Huon, and then back to Hobart. We had a long stop at the lovely Cygnet (it apparently being the official home of the Black Swan) and I had the pleasure of walking into a wonderful secondhand bookshop with Noori, and after a brief chat the old shopkeeper asked me to wait and went into the back, only to walk back a few minutes later with an old-but-in-great-condition set of Prof. Manning Clark's History of Australia. When I protested, mildly, about the weight, he gave me a further discount and whipped out a AusPost bag so that I could ship it home then and there. He also gifted this little monster a book. Meanwhile Sravani returned from a nearby gift ship with a lovely little sailing boat piece, and we later picked up these 'squishy mugs' from the same shop. DN refused to eat much lunch but had fun playing with other people's dogs, returning hugs given by other kids, and being a darling- waving, blowing kisses, showering smiles- to many who crossed paths with her. We stopped at the Tasmanian Botanical Gardens before checking back into Rydges, and then went for dinner to a Nepali place. Then the night routine and as they sleep I finish today's entry while telling myself to write something about nations-stories that I've been thinking on and off the last few days.

10/Apr/2026

The modern mind craves legibility. Perhaps its always been true for all minds, especially human ones, but I suppose The Age of Enlightenment has created in us an expectation of a good explanation, and now non-knowingness makes us itchy, uncomfortable, neurotic.

I recently read somewhere two essential preconditions for a nation: One that enough people have shared memories, another that they want to stay together. I think the latter is predicated on economics more than any innate goodness or acceptance- this is mostly thanks to my long TSATU listens; But what allows for the former, especailly in places like urban Australia where there's been a huge influx of Indian|Chinese migrants in a little over a generation. The answer is obviously mainstream pop culture. Like the title of that book suggests, we've all been Americanised enough in the last 2-3 generations to be able to broadly signify and interpret cultural signals- atleast enough to get by in a professional, transactional setting. But now with the collapse of the mainstream we're losing that platform and that is atleast one of the reasons, the way I see it, in addition to the economic downturn ofcourse that's causing a more ethnic/racial surge towards the right. When the soft but self-selected choices fail, then the circumstantial will take over again. Now your cultural prefernces may be inscrutable to me but your race/ accent are easy to comprehend so I'll use that to create associations.

We drove to the Central Highlands today and ended up in dense, deserted forests, enveloped by cold, rain, and the overwhelming trees, 25-30 kms away from other human sightings, with no phone signal, lost twice, and I felt serious levels of dread building up within me: what if we have a puncture, what if we take the wrong turn and end up deeper, what if we encounter an animal, what if we careen off? It was shocking to realise how vulnerable we felt hardly an hour and a half away from Hobart, how inconsequential in the slightly grander scheme of things. The jungle felt like a kraken like entity, all powerful, waiting, luring, its awesome power being able to overcome us in an instant. And I thought of the first colonial explorers, the Flinders, the Blighs, the Blaxlands, walking into forests and deserts thousands of kilometers from their lands, armed perhaps with some ammunition, some essentials, but otherwise dependent on their courage, imagination, cunning, skill, to chart, subjugate, conquer, exterminate every other being they encounter- people, animals, elements. How did they do it? Not just the European cartographers and navigators and sailors and administrators who've created our modern world, but also the older inhabitants of these lands? Isn't a forest the ultimate indecipherable entity- especially for a city-bred, Westernised mind? Doesn't its illegibilty confuse and intimidate them? And what you can't comprehend, you find the need to control and subjugate? Isn't then all racism/ speciesism etc., outside ofcourse of wanton violence, primarily an ontological failure?

We left around 9 this morning and headed to this coffee|croissant place, Pigeon Whole Bakery, in the CBD. Afterwards we set Styx Conservation Reserve on Google Maps and drove about 60 kms from Hobart and took a sharm turn off A10, after following the Derwent for a while and crossing Bushy Park (hehe), down a country road. The first few kilometres were pleasant enough, although conspiciously lonely, and in a few kms the jungle started encroaching the road more and more, trees grew denser and higher together, and the rain started to pick up. I felt a chill go down my spine but we had a sense this was a bit of a jungle area and kept following GMaps- now effectively in offline mode because we'd lost all network. Sravani must've driven for about 45 minutes, the only sounds that of rain pattering on the windshield and the tyres crunching the gravel for even Noori had gone silent, when in the middle of nowhere Google said we'd arrived. Forget the Giant Trees we wanted to see, it took a few minutes to build up the courage to step out of the car. After a few perfunctory photos, we rushed back and midway through realised that we were going off on a road different to the one we'd come in. Thankfully though the woods was clearing, the sun was shining, and it felt like we were heading towards civilisation. We exited onto A10 eventually and stopped a few kms later at Westerway Raspberry farm for a brief snack. Sravani then suggested we drive to Gordon Dam, it was 2.5 hours from there and had been on my list for being the highest damn in the Southern Hemisphere, and we set off. After crossing Maydena on B61 we finally saw the board we'd been looking for all morning, Styx Big Tree Walk 15 Km, and decided to take the brief detour. Now that the sun was shining and we could see the boards, it seemed like a domesticated beast. We were proved wrong within 5 minutes. I'm not sure if our timing was rotten or if these ancient forests, at those altitudes, do create microclimates because we were again hit with mist, fog, rain, deserted and shambolic roads. 15 kms took 30-40 minutes to drive to, the experience very similar to the morning's offroad experience with the only saving grace being we could see direction boards, and we finally arrived at the Styx reserve to see that no trees were visible from there but that that point was the culmination of the walk to see them. With the weather, timing, ill-prepared attire, not to mention Noori, hike was out of the question, and after few more photos, we drove back- this time losing the path before thankfully finding our way back to the B Road. The highlight of that leg for me was going off on Apocalypse Now, Aguirre the wrath of God, and other 'Epic Cinema' schpiel with Sravani both prompted by the wilderness but also as a distraction from the claustrophobia we were feeling on those nowhere roads. Then we set off towards Strathgordon but I felt uncomfortable driving that far in the current weather with Dharani, and so we decided to turn around after Florentine. For our trouble, we were treated to a completely unexpected vista of snow-capped mountains and the drive was spectacular reminding me of the ride from Ravello to Villa Cimbrone- though ofcourse not as magical (though Sravani insists nothing ever is for me). Once we hit Wood Ferry and ate some chips, walking back into the warm embrace of societies, we became more normal and the drive back to Hobart was uneventful if wet. After dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant called Cyclo, back to the hotel, and most packing done for the return flight to Sydney tomorrow morning.

11/Apr/2026

Noori woke us up at 5 and we had to play Phir Se on loop to coax her back to sleep so that we could nap for a bit. Got out of the room at 7.58 after finishing leftover brekkie and had coffee at Born in Brunswick. Then we went to the famous Salamanca Markets, bought little knick-knacks, and then to the airport for the 11.35 flight back to Sydney. Bye Tassie, for now.

And here's what Sravani has to say:

It has been a wonderful experience travelling with Dharani. Of course as parents, you love your kid and would in all likelihood do almost anything you can for them, but liking your kid and enjoying your kid are different matters. I love Dharani more than anyone in this world but this trip has been especially lovely because I have enjoyed her so much. She has started to develop her own personality which is both endearing and scary (the tantrums are definitely not welcome). She now understands much more than she can talk and communicate but she does find her ways to express herself. The strong no's and the refusal to let her food or moods be dictated by anyone- it has been incredible to witness and I find myself enraptured by my little daughter. She was also a great travel companion, never troubling us unless of course she got really uncomfortable, hungry or tired and when she just wanted to be comforted. She worked with our times, had a blast eating all the junk food that is otherwise not part of her routine, kept us entertained throughout, and just thoroughly enjoyed herself. I think it's definitely her infectious enthusiasm that has me and Aditya planning for more trips, even if day trips within our state so that we three can enjoy each other's company without too many distractions.

Tassie has been wonderful though we barely scratched the surface. There's definitely something about planning a trip and letting yourself get away that does a wonderful job as a reset button. You cannot escape who you are but who you are takes on a slightly blurry edge softening the corners and edges so that you feel like you can tolerate yourself and if possible even enjoy your own company as you take on new sights and vistas and experiences. I have never felt the need for transformative experiences or epiphanies during travel but the hope that comes with seeing something out of your comfort zone or experiencing new food is quite addictive. Well if it leads to better habits and a little bit more discipline in daily life, why not! We intend to travel more this year with DN and let's see how that goes for this year.