As part of our explorations armed with nothing but the camera in our Honor 5c smartphone, we have taken you to Agrasen ki Baoli, India Gate, Lodhi Gardens, and Connaught Place. Next we decided to head to somewhere more exotic - our home town in Himachal Pradesh.
With the onset of monsoon, we were really excited about this impromptu trip. Mountains are a real delight in the monsoons. Emrald green hills, cool rains, cool days and cold nights, field explorations - there was so much to look forward to. Moreover, we would be meeting our family after a long time.
When we say our hometown, there are two places in Himachal Pradesh we call home. One is a little village called "Chauntra" in the Hamirpur District, and the other is a slightly larger village called "Badahin" in the Mandi district. The former is where the maternal side of our family stays and the latter is where the paternal side stays. Both the villages have their own unique charms.
This time we were headed to Chauntra. Our grandparents' house in Chauntra is a traditional Himachali house with mud walls, ingenious home-built plumbing, and tiled roofs. The kitchen is on the first floor with a mud choolha, and the bathroon is a hundred feet away from the actual home. One entire cluster of houses belongs to our family and one just has to step out of the house to run into uncles and aunts. The panoramic shots in this post are of that same cluster of houses. 
Our grandparents also own a buffalo and a little calf. Our grandparents' lives revolves around taking care of them. They also have some fields, some close by and some far flung that need tending to. Apart from taking care of the livestock and fields, they also need to bring fresh grass for the buffalo. All this might appear charming and exotic, but it involves a lot of hardwork. They wake up at around 5 in the morning and go to bed at around 9:30. And in between, they hardly take 15 minutes of break.
The snack in the photograph above is called Pattaure. They are made from colocasia leaves, layered with chick peas flour and various spices. This is one of the common monsoon snacks of Himachal Pradesh, and is a good example of how people in the rural places try to use every part of a plant that can be used.
The pictures in this post are all shot using the in-built camera of Honor 5c. The results for these compositions are satisfactory and go a long way in proving our hypothesis that if you don't intend to shoot professional quality photos, you don't need to purchase an expensive DSLR. The camera in your smartphone should be enough if you take care to choose the smartphone well.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, I would request you to follow these things when traveling -
- Manage your waste well and don’t litter
- Use dustbins. Tell us if you went to a place and found it hard to locate a dustbin.
- Avoid bottle waters in hills. Usually you get clean water in hills and water bottles create lot of mess in our ecosystem.
- Say big no to plastic and avoid those unhealthy snacks packed in plastic bags. Rather buy fruits.
- Don't play loud blaring music in forests of jungle camps. You are a guest in that ecosystem and disturbing the locals (humans and animals) is not polite
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