In January 2009, Tom and I spent about nine weeks traveling around India. We used a company called Intrepid Travel (www.intrepidtravel.com) to arrange logistics, as we were unsure about transportation and lodging. Intrepid Travel calls itself “the largest small group adventure travel company in the world”, and emphasizes real life, as opposed to history and culture. I was comfortable with this approach, as my major area of study was South Asia, and I spent 8 weeks in a total Immersion Hindi course. I could at least read signs and sometimes could understand what people were saying. We also knew that our trip was a “go” with just two of us, which was good, because we were traveling only a few months after the bombing of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, and tourism had come to a screeching halt.
We booked four two-week trips:
· A loop from Kochi, Kera across southern India to Pondicherry and back.
· A loop from Delhi southwest around Rajasthan
· A loop from Delhi east to Varanasi
·
A loop from Delhi through northern India
I love color, and India is a land of color. When you travel to Japan, where everyone wears tasteful black, beige, or blue, or even travel within the US, where the uniform is jeans and T-shirts, you don't realize how important color is. During the holiday of Holi, even the people are colorful. I hope these photos show you what I mean.
It's hard to describe nine weeks in a country of 1.3 billion people (four times the population of the US), so I'll try to show you what we saw and did. If you have any questions or would like to see more pictures of an area, please contact me.