The Trip to India, June 2009
Why India and why in June?
The short answer is ‘saving’ and the longer one is the fact that the magnificent image of Taj Mahal has been haunting me for ages and I vowed to view it in person within my lifetime. So when I saw the special discount offered by Friendly Planet on a week-long visit to India termed ‘Taj Mahal Express’ ($999 including round trip airfare from JFK) which appeared in the Travelzoo Top 20 newsletter, I jumped right in. The newsletter is put out weekly by Travelzoo.com, highlighting some of the travel discounts offered by various vendors each week. I signed up for the newsletter years ago because I was awarded a free share of the company’s stock for doing so and I was dreaming of getting rich one day! Unfortunately I have no idea where my share is and how much it is worth right now! I picked the departure date of June 8 because the French Open would end on the 7th! It seemed a perfect vacation for this tennis nut before the start of another grand slam (Wimbledon) a week after my return and there would be time enough to nurse the jet-lag upon my return! To my infinite dismay, however, a few days after I paid for the tour in full a more attractive offer with exactly the same price and with better accommodations along with free optional side tours was being offered by another travel outfit called Smar Tours which also appeared in the same newsletter! Well, that’s life and I had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill!
A respite before the long journey.
Since our one and only precious grandson Milo (but Aya is giving us another one in the Fall!) lives in New York, we made every effort and excuse to go see him whenever we could, lest he forgets the grandparents living in the distant Nashville. So we decided to go a couple of days earlier to spend a weekend in NYC. We stayed at Aya’s place and had a couple of meals together with our immediate family. Aside from seeing Milo and having a proper rest before the long journey, we also enjoyed watching the final of the French Open on TV witnessing my favorite player Roger (my alias in the tennis club!) capturing the elusive clay title for the first time with tears of joys in his eyes, nicely culminating the two weeks of tennis which I followed religiously! I also followed the final rounds of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition via its webcast and learned of the awarding of gold medals to a 20-year old blind pianist from Japan and a 19-year old Chinese pianist studying at Curtis. On Monday Melvin picked us up from Aya’s flat and dropped us off at JFK for our long flight to Delhi via Air India.
The non-eventful long plane ride.
The flight from JFK to Delhi was about 14 hours. Thank God it was a direct flight; otherwise it could have taken us the whole 24 hours! Nothing much we could do in the plane except watching movies. Fortunately the movie selections were not bad, with some old classics and recent releases. So the 14-hour stretch was taken care of by watching 4 movies, occasional naps, and meals. As to the Indian food, I was well prepared on that score. Realizing it could be a problem with my body adjusting to foreign foods with strange spices, I had the foresight to train my stomach getting used to them. A month before the trip we went to Bombay Palace, an Indian restaurant in Nashville strongly recommended by an Indian professor of theology at Vanderbilt and my occasional tennis nemesis. The first time I got a terrible diarrhea which kept me awake the whole night rushing to the toilet. Not ready to give up, we went the second time a few days later and it improved considerably except for the occasional pungent farts released. The third time was the charm and not even one single fart, pungent or not, was generated. So the Indian food on the plane didn’t bother me a bit and I passed the test with flying color!
It is hot!
I don’t mean the Indian spices; I am talking about the weather! We arrived in Delhi with great anticipation and were met by the local representatives of the Friendly Planet. The first thing hit you when you walked out of the airport to board the bus was the suffocating heat, it was around 110F! The heat was almost unbearable for the entire trip especially during the outdoor walking tours under the scorching sun and Katherine would rather forgo seeing some interesting sites than suffering the terrible heat! Fortunately the bus was air-conditioned and after the ½ -hour bus ride we checked into the LaLit Hotel which was unexpectedly luxurious with the bargain price we paid for the tour. It turned out June is one of the hottest months and thus we have come to India during the off-season with the bargain price!
Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur
. These are the three cities we visited which constitute the Golden Triangle of the northern India. Agra is best known as the location of the Taj Mahal, the single most important sight a visitor to India can see. This structure was ordered built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. It took some 20,000 laborers 22 years to build using white marbles decorated with elaborate patterns of semiprecious stones (heavy Persian influence). A reflecting pool adorned with classical gardens lay in front of the magnificent building. We also visited Agra Fort, built under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1565, containing numerous palaces and a white marble mosque. Itmad-ud-Daulah’s tomb also known as the ‘baby Taj Mahal’ was another site visited and it was the first Mughal structure totally built from marble.
Jaipur is famous for the unusual rose-colored sandstone architecture that gives the city its nickname, the Pink City. The early 18th-century Jantar Mantar is the largest and best preserved of the five observatories built by astronomer Prince Jai Singh II. The prince had the huge stone structures built to measure time, chart the declination of celestial bodies, and predict eclipses. The other attraction was the City Palace/Museum, which was once a beautiful royal residence. We also made a photo stop at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, Jaipur’s signature building and is famous for its beehive-like structure. However, the highlight of the Jaipur visit was the elephant ride up the hill to see the 18-century Amber Palace and Fort for which I have photos to prove it!
Delhi is the capital of India and actually consists of two separate cities. The old city of Delhi, which the Mughuts built and lived in; and New Delhi, built by the British and expanded since independence in 1947. We visited Red Fort, Qutub Minor, and India Gate. The Fort has Diwan-e-am and Dwan-e-Khas where the king granted audiences to the public and to important people, respectively. Qutub Minar is a tall and magnificent structure built by Muslim King Qutub-un-din Aibak in 1199 A.D. India Gate, a 42 meter high structure is a war memorial in honor of soldiers who died during the second World War.
Some memorable personages and coincidences.
There were a total of three buses hired by the Friendly Planet to transport us around and we were with the #1 bus. Since nearly all of us learned about the tour via travelzoo.com, the demographic make-up of the group is very representative of the US population. Unlike the Vantage Tours we had taken before which are mostly geared to older and more affluent populace, we had a younger and more bargain-seeking crowd on this trip. There were about 25 people in our bus and we got to know some of them better during the course of our tour.
We established a bit of kinship with an expatriated Iranian couple from Texas because we were in Iran about a year ago. He was in the Ph.D. program at Texas A & M University with a teaching assistant post in the Industrial Engineering department and nearly completed the degree requirements when the Islamic revolution (about 30 years ago) started in Iran and the American embassy occupied and hostages taken. Shortly after, he received a letter from the University informing him that his service was no longer needed. Out of desperation he started buying some used cars and refurbishing them for resale, even though he knew very little about car engines at that time. Slowly and surely he got a foothold in that college town and eventually ended up owning a big junkyard and a sizable car repair garage. Later on his wife also opened up a child-care facility and operated for a few years. Now they sold their businesses and are wealthy enough to own a house in Esfahan (a beautiful city in Iran) and commuting back and forth from Texas. The couple started traveling because their two daughters are now happily married and residing in the States. We were all anxiously trying to find out the election result in Iran on Sunday; unfortunately our hotel in Jaipur didn’t carry CNN or BBC World News. Thus we had to wait until we got back to Delhi to find out the sham result!
And then there was a young man of oriental face seating a few rows behind us. When our local guide walked past his seat in the bus he started talking to him in Hindu, quite a strange sight indeed! As a matter of fact he carried a big Hindu dictionary with him on this trip. At another occasion I saw and heard him talking to the Iranian couple in Farsi and someone told me he knew 7 or 8 languages. Later on we chanced to talked to him in private and found out that he is a 5th year medical resident at the UCLA hospital and his parents are Chinese from Hong Kong and are now living in New York. The reason he could speak Farsi is because there is a large population of Iranian Jews in California and LA in particular which he had constant contact in the hospital! When we told him we were from Nashville, he said “my god, I went to Vanderbilt Medical School!” He knew of Dr. Stanley Cohen, Katherine’s boss at the medical center and a Nobel Prize winner. What a small world and what a coincidence! So one night when we three were having dinner together in a restaurant, being the white-haired elder I felt obligated to take care of the young and bought him a dinner.
Talking about coincidences, at the farewell dinner (the only free meal provided by the Friendly Planet) in a nice restaurant in Delhi, I was sitting in front of a young black lady from Martinique (the birth place of Napoleon’s Josephine) who is currently teaching French and Spanish in a Virginia high school. I asked her where she went to school in the US and she said ‘State University of New York at Stony Brook’. Then I recalled asking the young Chinese doctor earlier why he decided to go to Vanderbilt Medical School and his reply was because it offered him a full scholarship. Thinking that he might have graduated with summa cum laude from some university, I asked him where he did his undergraduate and he replied ‘SUNY at Stony Brook’. And I also recalled that one of the ladies in the group is an engineer working for Raytheon in Massachusetts making Patriot missiles and I remembered asking her if she graduated from MIT but she replied in the negative and pronounced herself to be a graduate of SUNY at Stony Brook. So I single-handed brought those three to have a mini reunion in a restaurant in the faraway land of India and the city of Delhi, what an impossible probability of having 3 out of a group of 25 to graduate from the same school!
Street vendors and the ugly Americans.
Since we had been to places such as Brazil, Cambodia, and Egypt we were pretty much used to the aggressive street vendors selling gifts to tourists. Yet the ones in India seemed much more tenacious and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. It appeared that the persistency is directly proportional to the extent of poverty in a country. But some in our group got upset at times and yelled out loud ‘NO!’ or ‘get away!’ to their faces. The lack of compassions and rowdy behaviors reminded me of the book published years ago entitled ‘The Ugly Americans’! We were indeed terrible ambassadors for our country! If you were a skillful bargainer like me, you could get some good buys on gifts from this huge and colorful country. I believe I got some good bargains, rescuing Katherine from paying too much on some items.
So here it is, my report on our short and interesting trip to India (actually only 5 days because we lost two days on air flights!).
Why India and why in June?
The short answer is ‘saving’ and the longer one is the fact that the magnificent image of Taj Mahal has been haunting me for ages and I vowed to view it in person within my lifetime. So when I saw the special discount offered by Friendly Planet on a week-long visit to India termed ‘Taj Mahal Express’ ($999 including round trip airfare from JFK) which appeared in the Travelzoo Top 20 newsletter, I jumped right in. The newsletter is put out weekly by Travelzoo.com, highlighting some of the travel discounts offered by various vendors each week. I signed up for the newsletter years ago because I was awarded a free share of the company’s stock for doing so and I was dreaming of getting rich one day! Unfortunately I have no idea where my share is and how much it is worth right now! I picked the departure date of June 8 because the French Open would end on the 7th! It seemed a perfect vacation for this tennis nut before the start of another grand slam (Wimbledon) a week after my return and there would be time enough to nurse the jet-lag upon my return! To my infinite dismay, however, a few days after I paid for the tour in full a more attractive offer with exactly the same price and with better accommodations along with free optional side tours was being offered by another travel outfit called Smar Tours which also appeared in the same newsletter! Well, that’s life and I had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill!
A respite before the long journey.
Since our one and only precious grandson Milo (but Aya is giving us another one in the Fall!) lives in New York, we made every effort and excuse to go see him whenever we could, lest he forgets the grandparents living in the distant Nashville. So we decided to go a couple of days earlier to spend a weekend in NYC. We stayed at Aya’s place and had a couple of meals together with our immediate family. Aside from seeing Milo and having a proper rest before the long journey, we also enjoyed watching the final of the French Open on TV witnessing my favorite player Roger (my alias in the tennis club!) capturing the elusive clay title for the first time with tears of joys in his eyes, nicely culminating the two weeks of tennis which I followed religiously! I also followed the final rounds of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition via its webcast and learned of the awarding of gold medals to a 20-year old blind pianist from Japan and a 19-year old Chinese pianist studying at Curtis. On Monday Melvin picked us up from Aya’s flat and dropped us off at JFK for our long flight to Delhi via Air India.
The non-eventful long plane ride.
The flight from JFK to Delhi was about 14 hours. Thank God it was a direct flight; otherwise it could have taken us the whole 24 hours! Nothing much we could do in the plane except watching movies. Fortunately the movie selections were not bad, with some old classics and recent releases. So the 14-hour stretch was taken care of by watching 4 movies, occasional naps, and meals. As to the Indian food, I was well prepared on that score. Realizing it could be a problem with my body adjusting to foreign foods with strange spices, I had the foresight to train my stomach getting used to them. A month before the trip we went to Bombay Palace, an Indian restaurant in Nashville strongly recommended by an Indian professor of theology at Vanderbilt and my occasional tennis nemesis. The first time I got a terrible diarrhea which kept me awake the whole night rushing to the toilet. Not ready to give up, we went the second time a few days later and it improved considerably except for the occasional pungent farts released. The third time was the charm and not even one single fart, pungent or not, was generated. So the Indian food on the plane didn’t bother me a bit and I passed the test with flying color!
It is hot!
I don’t mean the Indian spices; I am talking about the weather! We arrived in Delhi with great anticipation and were met by the local representatives of the Friendly Planet. The first thing hit you when you walked out of the airport to board the bus was the suffocating heat, it was around 110F! The heat was almost unbearable for the entire trip especially during the outdoor walking tours under the scorching sun and Katherine would rather forgo seeing some interesting sites than suffering the terrible heat! Fortunately the bus was air-conditioned and after the ½ -hour bus ride we checked into the LaLit Hotel which was unexpectedly luxurious with the bargain price we paid for the tour. It turned out June is one of the hottest months and thus we have come to India during the off-season with the bargain price!
Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur
. These are the three cities we visited which constitute the Golden Triangle of the northern India. Agra is best known as the location of the Taj Mahal, the single most important sight a visitor to India can see. This structure was ordered built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. It took some 20,000 laborers 22 years to build using white marbles decorated with elaborate patterns of semiprecious stones (heavy Persian influence). A reflecting pool adorned with classical gardens lay in front of the magnificent building. We also visited Agra Fort, built under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1565, containing numerous palaces and a white marble mosque. Itmad-ud-Daulah’s tomb also known as the ‘baby Taj Mahal’ was another site visited and it was the first Mughal structure totally built from marble.
Jaipur is famous for the unusual rose-colored sandstone architecture that gives the city its nickname, the Pink City. The early 18th-century Jantar Mantar is the largest and best preserved of the five observatories built by astronomer Prince Jai Singh II. The prince had the huge stone structures built to measure time, chart the declination of celestial bodies, and predict eclipses. The other attraction was the City Palace/Museum, which was once a beautiful royal residence. We also made a photo stop at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, Jaipur’s signature building and is famous for its beehive-like structure. However, the highlight of the Jaipur visit was the elephant ride up the hill to see the 18-century Amber Palace and Fort for which I have photos to prove it!
Delhi is the capital of India and actually consists of two separate cities. The old city of Delhi, which the Mughuts built and lived in; and New Delhi, built by the British and expanded since independence in 1947. We visited Red Fort, Qutub Minor, and India Gate. The Fort has Diwan-e-am and Dwan-e-Khas where the king granted audiences to the public and to important people, respectively. Qutub Minar is a tall and magnificent structure built by Muslim King Qutub-un-din Aibak in 1199 A.D. India Gate, a 42 meter high structure is a war memorial in honor of soldiers who died during the second World War.
Some memorable personages and coincidences.
There were a total of three buses hired by the Friendly Planet to transport us around and we were with the #1 bus. Since nearly all of us learned about the tour via travelzoo.com, the demographic make-up of the group is very representative of the US population. Unlike the Vantage Tours we had taken before which are mostly geared to older and more affluent populace, we had a younger and more bargain-seeking crowd on this trip. There were about 25 people in our bus and we got to know some of them better during the course of our tour.
We established a bit of kinship with an expatriated Iranian couple from Texas because we were in Iran about a year ago. He was in the Ph.D. program at Texas A & M University with a teaching assistant post in the Industrial Engineering department and nearly completed the degree requirements when the Islamic revolution (about 30 years ago) started in Iran and the American embassy occupied and hostages taken. Shortly after, he received a letter from the University informing him that his service was no longer needed. Out of desperation he started buying some used cars and refurbishing them for resale, even though he knew very little about car engines at that time. Slowly and surely he got a foothold in that college town and eventually ended up owning a big junkyard and a sizable car repair garage. Later on his wife also opened up a child-care facility and operated for a few years. Now they sold their businesses and are wealthy enough to own a house in Esfahan (a beautiful city in Iran) and commuting back and forth from Texas. The couple started traveling because their two daughters are now happily married and residing in the States. We were all anxiously trying to find out the election result in Iran on Sunday; unfortunately our hotel in Jaipur didn’t carry CNN or BBC World News. Thus we had to wait until we got back to Delhi to find out the sham result!
And then there was a young man of oriental face seating a few rows behind us. When our local guide walked past his seat in the bus he started talking to him in Hindu, quite a strange sight indeed! As a matter of fact he carried a big Hindu dictionary with him on this trip. At another occasion I saw and heard him talking to the Iranian couple in Farsi and someone told me he knew 7 or 8 languages. Later on we chanced to talked to him in private and found out that he is a 5th year medical resident at the UCLA hospital and his parents are Chinese from Hong Kong and are now living in New York. The reason he could speak Farsi is because there is a large population of Iranian Jews in California and LA in particular which he had constant contact in the hospital! When we told him we were from Nashville, he said “my god, I went to Vanderbilt Medical School!” He knew of Dr. Stanley Cohen, Katherine’s boss at the medical center and a Nobel Prize winner. What a small world and what a coincidence! So one night when we three were having dinner together in a restaurant, being the white-haired elder I felt obligated to take care of the young and bought him a dinner.
Talking about coincidences, at the farewell dinner (the only free meal provided by the Friendly Planet) in a nice restaurant in Delhi, I was sitting in front of a young black lady from Martinique (the birth place of Napoleon’s Josephine) who is currently teaching French and Spanish in a Virginia high school. I asked her where she went to school in the US and she said ‘State University of New York at Stony Brook’. Then I recalled asking the young Chinese doctor earlier why he decided to go to Vanderbilt Medical School and his reply was because it offered him a full scholarship. Thinking that he might have graduated with summa cum laude from some university, I asked him where he did his undergraduate and he replied ‘SUNY at Stony Brook’. And I also recalled that one of the ladies in the group is an engineer working for Raytheon in Massachusetts making Patriot missiles and I remembered asking her if she graduated from MIT but she replied in the negative and pronounced herself to be a graduate of SUNY at Stony Brook. So I single-handed brought those three to have a mini reunion in a restaurant in the faraway land of India and the city of Delhi, what an impossible probability of having 3 out of a group of 25 to graduate from the same school!
Street vendors and the ugly Americans.
Since we had been to places such as Brazil, Cambodia, and Egypt we were pretty much used to the aggressive street vendors selling gifts to tourists. Yet the ones in India seemed much more tenacious and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. It appeared that the persistency is directly proportional to the extent of poverty in a country. But some in our group got upset at times and yelled out loud ‘NO!’ or ‘get away!’ to their faces. The lack of compassions and rowdy behaviors reminded me of the book published years ago entitled ‘The Ugly Americans’! We were indeed terrible ambassadors for our country! If you were a skillful bargainer like me, you could get some good buys on gifts from this huge and colorful country. I believe I got some good bargains, rescuing Katherine from paying too much on some items.
So here it is, my report on our short and interesting trip to India (actually only 5 days because we lost two days on air flights!).
1 comment:
Thank you so much for your fascinating post about your trip to India with our company. We would love to be able to share your post with our own blog readers. If you've got some photos of your trip that you're willing to share, that will make your great post even better.
While India is quite hot in June, we could not resist the opportunity to offer this terrific deal to our travelers. Like you, many have dreamed of seeing the Taj Mahal and other amazing aspects of India with their "own eyes" and the price of our tour made that dream possible for many.
Thanks again for your terrific post. I hope we'll have the pleasure of your company on a future Friendly Planet tour.
Peggy M. Goldman, President
Friendly Planet Travel Inc.
www.friendlyplanet.com
Post a Comment