Botanical Gardens

We had a good turnout at the Botanical Gardens on April 3, 2005. Madhuri brought Ruth who was there after a long time as well as another girl from Austria. Rajesh and his wife were there along with Rajesh Nath who will be traveling for the next 4 weeks. We must have been nearly 25 people. I brought along a French lady, Patricia, staying with me and she was delighted with the greenery and calm of the Botanical gardens and at the prospect of joining our hash and discovering Calcutta with such a wonderful group of people.

We bumped into Mr. Peter Nuttall from Goal and he may also want to join the Hash Group. You’re welcome anytime. New hashers who want to be in the group are requested to pay Rs.400 for 2 Calcutta Hash T shirts to wear to the walks. Hash cash for the walk: Rs.100

Each time we go to the Botanical Gardens we learn some new details from Bonani. The group split up and the slow walkers followed Shantanu towards the waterside where something had died and was fouling the air with a horrible smell. The yellow flowers in full bloom last month were no longer flowering. We saw instead huge trees with a canopy of pink powder puffs. We finally got a description of the palms. The palms that bifurcate in two are the Zanzibar palms. We learnt to differentiate between the betel nut trees and the tall Taal trees whose fruit make interesting fritters called taal bara. These home recipes may soon die out and Shantanu will have to be prevailed upon to bring some taal bara for our next outing. We even saw date palms and the prehistoric cycas trees one of the most primitive living seed plants with their yellow bullet cones. We saw trees from Honduras and dozens of canon balls on the canon ball tree. We even approached a keora tree that is supposed to be a favourite place for snakes as it grows on swampy ground and since we saw a mongoose in the branches, the story may be true. We saw a Kingfisher, a Golden Oriole and a crow pheasant. We saw a lot of still ponds covered in green duck weed but no ducks!
Our group as you can understand was late getting back to the Taj, but we managed to convince Jaap, walking with us, to do the canal trip next Sunday. He will let us know a venue to meet and where to park to visit the Tolly’s Nala.

The Park Street Cemetery sign has been put up and the mayor would like to inaugurate it before the Bengali New Year on 15th April, 2005. Whatever time suits him, not necessarily during Hash hours, some of us should go for the unveiling, although according to Carl, someone has already run off with the jute sack cloth covering the sign.

Here is the schedule for the next few Hashes:
April 10 Tolly’s Nala at 7 am. One hour visit of the canals with the Dutch. Jaap to confirm starting point
April 17 Park Street Cemetery 7 am To go see the sign and find all the tombs mentioned on the sign such as Rose Aylmer, De Rozio etc.
April 24 Taratala Environment Park 7 am
TARA channel is organizing the TARA Drive Kolkata Motor Rally also on 24th April. If you think the Sunday Hash group could sponsor a car, you could.
Entry fee Rs.500. Course length 100 km. Prize money Rs.1 lakh.
The TARA Drive Kolkata Motor rally will be covered on TARA NEWZ so here's a chance for hashers to be on TV.
Look out for more details before next Sunday.
GM Neela 9830014934