Mental pause

Sorry I haven't written anything about anything recently. After we got the visa materials all together, neatly packaged and sent them happily on their way....I decided to take a break.

We have a hotel for our arrival night, we have a flight, we will soon have a visa and my vaccinations are now all up to date (god my tetnus shot hurt for 4 straight days). There is nothing MAJOR left to do, but discus our route.

We were each told to go home and give some thought to what route we would like to take, and when I return from Seattle, we will converge one last time to finalize the basic outline. Until then though...it is hard to make me do my home work!

One truly disappointing thing however, is we are sadly missing the Seventh World Toilet Summet in New Delhi this week. If we were there during that time, at least we would be guaranteed to always have a nice clean shitter to dispense our travelers diarrhea in!
A TOILET FOR EVERYONE!

Meeting of the Indian Council

Last night all three of us get together for an official meeting, with me as their president (since the president of Indian right now is a woman, Pratibha Patil) and supreme ruler of awesomeness. Can I just off handedly say that it is going to be amazing have not just one, but THREE boys to boss around and get to do my bidding on this trip!

So the meeting convened with beers and buffalo chicken pizza (very indian, I know). First order of business was to finish the visa dance, and we did it all together! We put all the pieces together (giggled a lot at each others passport pictures), dotted all the i's, signed by the X's, etc. Stuffed them all in one envelope, with our precious passports and Bryan shipped them out UPS today (yeah Bryan! Thanks for dealing with all the shippings stuff!).

So after that was done, all the real fun began. Where do want to go? What do we want to do? What do people like to see? Cities? Temples? Camels? How long do we spend in the North verses the South? So many fun things for me to ponder. So we discussed and debated, argued, flipped through guide books and in general had a pretty informative time. We kind of, sort of got somewhere. Here are the places we MUST go:

Delhi (DUH! we are flying into there)
Jodhpur
Agra (The Taj!)
Varanasi
Bombay

Most of these are in the northern part of India, and that is where most of the cities are, and the more spectacular architecture. I requested that we spend a day outside of the major cities, in a smaller town, or near a temple or possibly a UNESCO site (you should totally not ignore that link, there are lots of things to learn there!). So we may travel around the north, city to city and seeing all the really famous things and the grand culture of the Sultans and Rajas. In the south however, we may simply fly in to Chennai (Madras) and hope our way smaller town to smaller town over to Bombay. I really like that idea a lot, but Chris sounds like he wants to travel the big towns more. We will see.

We are planning on meeting again before we go, after I get back from Seattle, and we will make some more finalized decisions then. We want to have any plane flights with in India, books before we get there. Right now however, we have gotten the really panicky stuff done, and so I am going to take a few days off to digest all the information.

Instincts of a tiger

Of the elusive snow tiger to be exact. Elusive, because I will be alluding the snow this year by being in India and Argentina during the winter months here!

So regarding the hotel of choice for Delhi, the Metropolis Tourist Home, I am glad that I followed my instincts (see description of my instinct above). After I got that half-assed response from them, I decided that I was going to suck it up on Monday morning and give them a call from work (Shhh, hopefully no one will notice that little short blip of a call to India on our long distance bill). So I called them and the conversation went something like this:

Man with deathly heavy Indian accent: Hello?
Me: Hello, is this Metropolis Tourist Home? I am calling to confirm a reservation with you.
Accent at the other end: What day would you like to make the reservation for?
Me: No, I already have a reservation. My name is Jennifer Richardson, for December 2.
Accent: nope, we have nothing.
Me: *sigh* okay, can I make one? For December 2.
Accent: Okay for December 2, what time do you arrive?
Me: 9:20, actually do you have an airport pick up service?
Accent: Yes, what flight are you on.
Me: (realize I don't know the airline I am flying on) Oh no, I don't know the airline I am flying on, I am sorry....
Accent: okay, you call me back in December *click*

And so it ended. I apparently had made a reservation, but for how many people, and how many nights, and which airline and which flight were they picking me (and others) up at? So really I had nothing.

Back to the drawing board I went. Looked into two more reliable looking email responses. One from the Hotel Namaskar, and one from the Hotel Star Paradise. Emailed both of them, got prompt responses, in well written English with details, and personalizations that let me know that at least someone had read my email! And presto, I picked one (The Hotel Star Paradise), confirmed the room reservations and we are all kinds of set!

I was really worried at first when I didn't trust the emails from the first hotel. I felt like I was being paranoid, and that the people there are so relaxed and had a totally different standard of interaction and that I should just let it slide and assume that things were fine. I am a notorious worrier! But in the end, I am glad that I took a step back, breathed, and listened to my tiger like instincts that told me this hotel was not a good idea. No mistakenly eating poison arrow frogs for this tiger!

Itinerary thoughts

So I am just going to put this down on paper, because they are my thoughts on a possible itinerary...because this is the sort of thing that I enjoy thinking out. (gosh what a NERD!)
In fact forget it, if I am going to nerd it up and think of an itinerary, why don't I just go all the way and make a map!


View Larger Map

Now this map/itinerary is based on hitting only bigger cities (especially in the south), on lingering around Goa for an extra day, and on taking ONLY over night trains so that we are not waisting a lot of day time/time on travels. That does however, mean that we will not have as many nights out. 6 nights would be spend on trains, instead of out on the town! But it depends on what people want, more day time to see things or more night time to be out with "the people" (like we will hang out with real indians! ha ha). The other thing to consider when traveling at night is that we will have our bags with us all during the days, after we check out of the hotels, and before we bored the train. Our hotels may allow us to store our luggage, but then we will always have to go back and get it. So night trains might NOT be the best idea....

These are all the different things that I am thinking about! But all these towns sound really good to visit! If I had my way, I actually might even skip Chennei. Doesn't sound that great...but then again, it is me and three great people, so we will probably have a good time where ever we go! I might even vote trying to fly into Hyderabad or even just going straight to Goa and exploring some of the smaller towns between there and Mumbai. So very much to think about, so many ideas to entertain!

No word yet

I wrote the Metropolis Tourist Home yesterday requesting the room that they offered. A double room with two extra beds in it, private bath (important for reasons mentioned previously) and shower and such. They didn't get back to me! Before they were very prompt.

I am nervous. Nervous about booking the hotels. How do we know the sites and the people on the other end are legitimate? How smart is it to give my credit card information to an unknown source in India. I mean, the person is responding from the email address given by the people in Lonely Planet. But...the email that I originally received was kind of shotty. Read for yourself:

"Greetings!,we can give you 1 big double deluxe room with 2 extra beds. the room will cost you Rs 1899 per day include taxes,the room is with attached abthroom hot n cold showers,television,refrigerator,telefone and aircondition,the airport transfer if required, will cost you USD$25 for 4 people,

regards"

Do the hotels simply not follow the same level of professionalism as they do here? Does the person who responded simply not speak English well? Or should I be listening to warning signals going off in my head? I guess I will continue as is, and hope that I am just being paranoid, because I have done this before (example: in Spain) were the responses didn't seem very legitimate, but the hotels were there!

Here's to crossin' my fingers and hoping! I also hope that the emailer on the other end responds at all! Else who knows what I am going to do! Responsibility is fun, until it is not fun any more (quote that bitches!)

Metropolis Tourist Home

We have tentatively picked out a "hotel" or home? The Metropolis Tourist Home. It is described as simple and characterless, but clean! And that is a step ABOVE the rest of the Delhi hotels. To it's credit however, it does have a roof top restaurant which we will definitely appreciate the night we get in. We are getting in at 9 something at night, and we will probably be hungry and disoriented and it will be great to have some where close to go that first night.

OH, and the room has it's own private bathroom, which is KEY. Since we will get sick, guaranteed, and I would rather the rest of the hotel didn't know my business :) So on that pleasant note, we have finished the second part of the dance, and now we just have to apply for our visas!

Flights are all set!

Looks like everyone has a flight!

Thanks to Abraham for buying the tickets for himself, Jen and I. Our flight leaves on the 1st of December and lands in Delhi on the 2nd. And Chris just sent a message saying that he'll be flying into Delhi on the 4th. Once we're done the Visa Dance we can get started on planning places to see.

The Visa Dance

As we begin our frantic scramble to prepare for our trip that is beginning a mere 6 weeks away, we find we have to all participate in this (semi) coordinated dance: The Visa Bharata Natyam (a a travelers variation of the tradition Indian dance). Between the four of us we attempt to find flights and hotels, locate our passports, photocopy things, get correctly sized pictures and dig into our short pockets for visa fees!

Thanks to Abe we now have a flight, leaving Boston on December 1 and flying to Delhi, and returning from Bombay on December 23. It only took us a week!

So we now move into the second movement of the dance....to be traditionally led by the women (that is me!)...the graceful search for a safe, clean, yet reasonably priced hotel in Delhi. We finally decided that of all places, Delhi was the one where we should drop the most money. It has a reputation for being dirty, crowded, noisy and all around insane! And OH the horror stories that we have all heard...bugs, smells, noises all night, rooms where you can touch all for walls from your bed! So chose wisely my sons....

We have in narrowed down to 6 or 7 choices, in the seedy yet backpacker alluring district of Pahargani, or the more expensive and slightly more central area of Connaught Place. See my map to give you a better idea of the choices and locations :)


View Larger Map

Soon we will finish this movement and move on to collecting up all the parts of the application and sending them. This part of the dance becomes a lot more energetic and frantic as all the previous movements start to come together in one large crescendo!