Travelling in India

Alright, it is just two days to take off. To give an idea to dear readers, I have marked the route of our trip in India. Though it looks like a small irregular shape, the distance covered is close to 5000kms. It’s going to be busses trains, cars for next 15 days. I wanted to include flight in at least one leg of the journey. But, none of destination points have a direct flight from one place to another. In India, each leg of flight journey roughly equals to 5K per person. So, it sounded like extravagance. Most of the journey is going to be on trains. Sometimes it is sleeper class and some times AC 3Tier if we could manage a reservation. We are going to hire car for most of the point to point travels around one destination.
India, with its booming economy, is taking rapid strides in ecommerce, web portals development. For example, I planned the whole trip sitting in front of my laptop. Two worthy websites that need to mention are www.erail.in and www.ixigo.com. Book mark them. I even wanted to book all my accommodation on net. Unfortunately, there is no good site for hotel reservation. What does a good hotels site need? A streamlined process, searching, leading to detailed rich pages, concluding to booking the accommodation. If you are staying 5-star or 4-star places, yes, there are some sites available. But this trip is going to be “spend where it is necessary” trip. So, no 5-star or 4-star accommodation.
So, we are going to rely mostly on www.justdial.com  another great company. These guys are yellow pages that are spread all over India, predominantly in cities worth their salt. How does this work? Say you are in Pune, looking for a car rental. Call 3999 9999 and get some car rental places numbers near railway station. They will give you 2-3 numbers. Negotiate a deal over phone, ask them to pick you up at station. You are set to go.  Well, pretty cumbersome process for people used to streamlined processes abroad. But, India is still working on this. Hopefully in another 3-5 years, stories like these will be history. By the way, there are interesting sites like (www.tolmolbol.com, www.mouthshut.com) which offer opinions on what ever it is you want to know. Unfortunately, these are all budding sites. Launched ambitiously but executing not so perfectly. I guess it will be an year or two by the time they are out of teething troubles.

Coming to our trip, most of its going to be on trains. Some contours in the road map are silly if you notice. There is no direct train from Indore to Pune. It has to go through All the way from Gujarat, Bombay to Pune. I can’t see any plausible explanation other than powerful Gujju lobbies twisting resources according their priorities. Now, I am novice to traveling in trains. My first major train journey was a 36 hour trip from Hyderabad-Delhi. Another I took from Hyderabad to Kochi. That should be enough experience. Both the times, I was conveniently left out of responsibilities. Somebody packed remotest thing that would be needed on the journey and I happily took a free raid. This time I really need to plan, considering the fact that I am the decision maker, albeit unwillingly  and more importantly, grandpa is accompanying us. He has his own food/bath/medicine needs. More about our planning in next blog. Ciao.