India January 14 - February 7, 2015

India  January 14 - February 7, 2015

This is the trip we did not expect to get to do and are really excited.  They say nothing can prepare you for the contrasts in this diverse country so I am prepared  that there will be no way I can communicate the experience fully else I too would have done so vicariously before going.   I do hope I can share my perspective and raw reactions to our daily experiences. 

We are grateful that we have enough miles through credit card signup bonuses to travel Business Class (our first time).   It will be helpful too as we have 2 consecutive overnight flights.  Our first leg will be Finnair overnight to Helsinki where we have a full day (only 3 hours of daylight) and then an overnight flight to New Delhi.  I'm sure we will be grateful for those fully reclining seats in business class!  We will go through 10.5 hours of time zones.

Our Itinerary in India will be New Delhi - Agra (Taj Mahal) - Ranthambore National Park for possible  tiger viewing, and visiting a women's cooperative - Jaipur (the pink city),  - Kolkata - Varanasi (The Sacred City) - Delhi. - Paris 4 days - home via Iceland.

 

The box with no name is Ranthambore National Park, Prempura, Rajasthan

One interesting random fact about India is that it covers 2 time zones  and rather than split the country into GMT +5 and GMT +6  they chose GMT+ 5:30 for the entire country.so they are 10.5 hours ahead of EST.

This will be our first trip where we are not traveling independently.  I have mixed feelings about that but age and India itself make using public transportation difficult.   So we will have a driver in each of the cities and a guide for some of the parts.  There will be some loss of freedom but an easier trip.

Because of a tour they offer in Delhi called "The People of Delhi - Many Faiths, Many Cultures"  I contacted "Magic Tours of India".  Deepa, the owner impressed us so much that we decided to use their help in planning the entire trip.  From then on our experience with Deepa and her staff gave us confidence that we could do this trip, and do it mostly our way as almost independent travelers.  They looked at the work we had done in planning and explained that we should not take the train in February due to fog and indeed we looked at train arrivals and departures and found most were experiencing very serious delays of many hours or canceled completely.  The trip took shape and we are ready to leave.

Come along and comments are welcome!