10/30/2006

The Elusive L

I've always considered myself to be quite Net-savvy. But every now and then, somebody from my circle of friends introduces me to a new web application I was previously ignorant about.

The last such app, was wikimapia, which apparently is based on google maps.

To my fascination, I could zoom up to 500 metres above my locality and pan around.
To my chagrin, people had cluttered up the view marking their homes with square rectangles.

My locality is nestled on a hill slope, a valley actually, surrounded by a lush green hillock on one side increasingly becoming bare due to illicit wood cutting.

On my exploration of wikimapia I discovered a strange L shaped structure in the middle of a hill, with no access routes.


And as usually happens when you have friends by your side, each one's imagination racing, we collectively fuelled our guesses about what the structure could be: a hidden government hideout, alien landing site, drug dealer zone,... you get the picture!

And so me and a friend decided to set out on a trek through the hills in search of our 'L'. The mysterious building in the middle of a jungle that had captured our imagination.

And so Sunday came, the eventful day. It was a long and arduous trek.
Steep climbs and some tumbles down the slope, a lot of bruises and nicks and nagging gnats.

We found it alright, a huge concrete bunker like structure in the middle of nowhere.

It turned out to be an abandoned water reservoir.



The satellite image must be at least a year old, cos' the roof of the reservoir had caved in (must have been chiseled off). But the collapse theory is credited by remains of reinforced iron bars that had become as brittle as the bark of a dead tree.




I wonder what it was, a spare reservoir that never came to be required and fell into disuse, or the result of low quality, corrupt contractors and bribe-taking civic officials.I guess the only way to find out is to throw the Right to Information act at Cidco officials and trace its history.

But what the heck, we had our adventure!