Travel on Setu's (micro)blog

Embracing the Discomfort: Skiiing Edition

Mon, 27 May 2024 16:58:19 -0700

In February 2021, a friend took us skiing for the first time. In the excitement of the opportunity, I severely under-estimated the difficulty of skiing, especially for someone who had never skated before (on land or ice). We went straight to the lift, up the mountain, and down the slope. And I fell. A lot. But that was also the day I decided I wanted to learn to ski and that I would be back. Someday.

Why I Use Apple Maps

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 19:33:14 -0800

For over 3 years now, since I moved to USA, I have primarily relied on Apple Maps for all of my travel and mapping needs. And the reasons for it, in more or less my order of priority, are pretty simple:

Apple Maps has all the places and locations I have ever wanted to go to. There hasn’t been a single place that I have tried to go to and not found it on it.
Ever since I started using it in 2016, it has never got me to a wrong place or put me on an incorrect route.
It has eerily accurate travel time predictions, and others agree. Waze may estimate the shortest times, but they are rarely ever accurate. Google Maps is better, but still has variability. Apple, on the other hand, usually predicts the exact time or slightly over. For me, that translates ETAs into TAs ;).
Privacy. This is a big, recurring and extremely important topic for me. I do not want one company to have all my data, use it for profiling me, follow me around the web and sell that data to target me with ads.
It is fast. Blazing fast. While Google Maps has continued to get more bloated over the years, Apple Maps has gotten faster. Vector maps do that, you know? That also means I haven’t really needed to ‘download maps for offline use’ (which Apple Maps does not offer). The cache is pretty reasonable so just routing to a place or exploring it has added the maps for to my device.
Speaking of offline use: It reroutes successfully even when I am offline and make a wrong turn or miss a turn!
The timing and space between Apple Maps notifications for upcoming turns matches the prep time I need to make a turn or take an exit.
While it doesn’t have the bells and whistles of Google Maps, it does maps right and that’s all I usually care about.
I have found Apple Maps’ lane guidance to be much more accurate.
With iOS 13, Apple Maps has added an incredible new amount of features that includes locations of signals and stop signs and included that for even better guidance (’turn right at the next light’!).

I Went to Statue of Unity

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 21:53:14 -0800

Almost about a month ago, I visited the Statue of Unity (SoU), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s statue near Baroda. Hailed as the biggest statue in the world, this was my first experience of visiting a tourist destination in India after living and traveling in USA for over 3 years. Here are some of my thoughts and observations from that visit, in approximate order of my visit:

I was there on 26th December, 2019. The tickets to go to the observation deck were sold out, so I could only walk up to the foot of the statue (more on that later).
My first (and most consistent) observation throughout was the sheer mismanagement of the whole operation. The site had 3 attractions, the statue itself, a garden and a dam viewpoint. The only way to travel from one of the parking lots to these attractions was to take a bus setup and run by the SoU complex. However, I could not choose where I went. I was forced to go from parking - statue - dam - garden - statue - parking, getting off at each step, walk fairly significant distances, wait in long lines, before being able to get into the next bus. Talk about compounding delays…
Every photo, hoarding, symbol in the SoU complex was attributed to Narendra Modi and (to a lesser extent) Vijay Rupani. I mean, just look at this bus run by SoU for transport in the area (not in the photo is a circular logo of Statue of Unity on the far left, of the same size as other circles). The photos of Modi and Rupani are, unsurprisingly, larger than the statue or Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel! Or look at the website for this statue, which maintains the same theme.

The transportation between different sights of attraction in the Statue of Unity complex.

U.S. National Park Service

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 16:56:58 -0700

It has been just over 3 years since I have been in the USA, and in this time I have come to realize that one of my favorite things about USA is the National Park Service. I have visited more than 15 national parks in various parts of the country, hiked across most of them, and marvelled at the things I saw. I have experienced snow-clad mountains, scorching deserts, canyons that have been shaped over millions of years, hot springs sitting on volcanoes, tiny streams, glacial lakes, and rivers with lush waterfalls. No 2 parks were the same and I have never felt underwhelmed at the end of each day.