I think that the holidays feel like frozen noses. I love walking with the dog for long periods of time.

Hopefully it's snowing and you've got to wrap up warm. So I think a frozen nose is

then sweaty armpits because like you're wrapped up so warm but then you're climbing hamps

and heath and you get to the top and you're like and then you can see the breath

but then your nose is still freezing to touch.

Joy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

I'm looking at what you might call a classic national geographic image.

It's a scene of one of the rainiest places on earth in its month soon season.

It's somewhere deep in a rainforest. There's a lush tapestry of thin brown tree

trunks and rich green leaves rising out of a swamp. Sunlight filters through a white

misty haze and I see two monkeys perched on a tree looking right at me.

This scene is set in a tropical rainforest called the Western Gats in southern India.

And since we're national geographic you might assume this image is a photograph

but it's not. It's a watercolor painting made by Naurupa Rao.

I've been to the Western Gats like practically every holiday since I was a kid.

Naurupa is a national geographic explorer and an artist who specializes in botanical

illustrations drawings and paintings of plants. She hiked to this swamp with a botanist

named Siddharth who also happens to be her cousin. In Naurupa's painting the swamp looks serene

but in reality it's a habitat for one of the deadliest snakes on the planet, the King Cobra.

To reach this swamp we had to trek through like waste-high water and there were leeches everywhere.

There was a leech in my eye at one point and so that's very casual. It's told me that

oh you have something in my ear eye let me just dig that out for you.

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