Hopping around India with a brief layover in Seoul 1 2 3 4 5

Trip Date: December 25th, 2017 - January 14th, 2018

India has only a third of the land area of the United States, yet in a way it is a much bigger country. We just returned from an 18 day vacation to India. Almost every night was spent in a new city given our typical Amazing Race / go-go-go style of travel, yet we managed to only barely scratch the surface of what this country has to offer. This is due to India's hyper-diversity arising from its long and complex history. While there are differences among American states, they don't come close to what you will find in India. Each of India's 36 states and territories is almost like another country with its own unique history, different language and alphabet. Visiting India is like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. In each town we learned fascinating facts about the town which always seemed to involve some new ruling kingdom. We also got more and more exposed (and confused) to the many religions that coexist here side by side. On the trip, we visited Hindu, Muslim, Baha'i, Jain, Sikh, Budhist, Christian, and Jewish religious sites. And despite moving from city to city on a daily basis, we had to skip many important sights. We completely missed the mountainous north which is full of spectacular views of the Himalayan mountains. We also didn't make it at all to the eastern states nestled between Bangladesh and China and connected to the rest of the country only via a thin sliver of land. This is where the famous Darjeeling tea comes from. We didn't visit a single "hill station", as mansions built at high elevations by the British to escape the summer heat are called. We skipped important cities such as Bangalore, home of India's IT industry; Kolkata, the capital under the British Raj; Hyderabad known for its Muslim influences; or Mysore, famous for yoga schools. We also didn't get to visit any tribal communities. Our brief stop by a nature preserve was not sufficient to see exotic animals. You can see just how little we covered in the map below. We started in Delhi and finished in Mumbai.

Map of our trip. The black segments are flights, red is the train ride to Agra, and the green parts are car travel.

This was actually my second time to India. The first visit was almost exactly 10 years ago and was limited to the "tourist golden triangle" of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. This time I wanted to see more, including the south which everyone was telling us is very different from the north (it is). Knowing just how chaotic India can be, we decided to go with a local tourist company instead of trying to deal with booking internal flights and drivers ourselves. I got to know Helene Cincebeaux from Treasure Tours through my Slovak cooking website. Helene organizes annual trips to Slovakia but recently expanded the destinations to include India. I asked her how she manages her India tours. She recommended that I get in touch with Sheesh from Hidden Treasures of India. Over several weeks of back and forth emails, we came up with an itinerary at a reasonable cost. Sheesh arranged our hotels, local guides, train and plane tickets, as well as drivers and people to meet us at the airport. The entire trip went almost totally hiccup free despite our ambitious schedule so Sheesh has my sincere recommendation. We ended up paying around $3,700 for the two of us. This included 5 internal flights, accommodation for 10 nights, camel (and elephant, but we missed this due to a late arrival) rides, plus all the local guides and drivers. It didn't include the cost of the flight to India, but as I already had bunch of United miles courtesy of the Chase MileagePlus card, the flight was free (we even managed to snag business class on the way back). The cost also didn't include tips and entrance fees to museums but these were usually fairly minor (around 500 rupees or $8 per person). We spent two nights at the Hyatt Regency in Delhi for free thanks to the annual free night credit that comes with the Hyatt credit card. Our tour with Sheesh ended with the arrival in Mumbai. There we stayed in Four Seasons, which was booked with some free night credits I had from Hotels.com. This trip report is split into 5 parts based on the states visited: 1) Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, 2) Rajasthan, 3) Tamil Nadu, 4) Kerala, and 5) Mumbai and the flight back with a stop over in Seoul, Korea.

Stop 1: Delhi (December 27th - December 29th)

We left Los Angeles on Christmas Day, December 25th at noon. We didn't get to India until 2am on December 27th which involved travel across the international dateline. India is 13.5 hours (yes, there is a 30 minute difference!) ahead of Los Angeles. Still, this was a long flight! We first had a 14 hour United flight to Shanghai. There we had a 3.5 hour layover but as we had to recheck our bags, there wasn't much time for lounging around. Still we managed to grab a light Chinese dinner before boarding the flight to India. This second leg was with Air India and was 7 hours long. The flight was nice, and we ended up enjoying few glasses of free whiskey with our seat mate, some Indian guy returning from a business trip to China.

Enjoying delicious Chinese noodles in Shanghai

The plane touched down in Delhi around 2:45 am but it took until almost 5 to make it through immigration. The line was ridiculously long and the immigration officers were working at the speed of the DMV workers in Zootopia. After passing through customs, we were greeted by the persons Sheesh had arranged for us. They offered us marigold garlands which was a nice surprise. I didn't know this ahead of time, but the way the tour process works is that typically there would be three people involved in each city visit. First there is one person who greets you at the airport. This person takes you to the driver and also makes sure your hotel check in goes smoothly. You don't see this person afterwards. At some later time, the driver returns to pick you up. A local guide may be with him, or you will meet the guide on the way to the tourist part. The guide usually stays with you just for the day while you are sightseeing. On the other hand, the driver stays with you until the driving part is complete. This may involve getting dropped off at the airport the following day, or may involve multiple days of inter-city driving. This is important to keep in mind since tipping is very much expected so you need to make sure to have bunch of change for all these various encounters. Additionally, you will need more small change for bell boys helping with the luggage.

Enjoying breakfast the Delhi Hyatt Regency. Here we had our first ever sambar.

We got to the hotel just before 6 am. After passing our bags through the customary X-ray machines to presumably screen for guns or bombs, we stopped by the front desk to inquire about check in options. I thought it would be silly to pay for a room for the prior night and figured we will just take a shower in the hotel gym and leave bags at the reception until the afternoon check in time. Well we got lucky as the receptionist told us he will have a room for us at 9am. This was great news. We spent the next three hours in the hotel restaurant. It wasn't quite yet ready for breakfast, but we were offered coffee while the workers filled the buffet stations. The breakfast spread at the Hyatt was impressive. We tried for the first time a really tasty vegetable soup called sambar. Seems that this is a typical Indian breakfast staple as it was offered at every hotel we stayed in. We ended up having sambar on a daily basis for the rest of the trip. The one here in Delhi was one of the best. In fact, this Hyatt had overall the best breakfast selection of all the hotels.

During breakfast we also got our first introduction to the infamous Delhi smog. By now, the daily pollution levels dropped off from the November airpocalypse but it was still quite noticeable. The restaurant doors led directly to the courtyard and whenever somebody went out, we could see a thick cloud billowing in. The visibility outside was so bad that you could barely see the top of the hotel tower from the swimming pool. Luckily the visibility and air quality improved as the day went on. This poor visibility was due to two factors. As we found out later first hand, northern India suffers from terrible fog in the winter months. It is also customary for people to dispose of trash by making little piles in front of their houses and setting them on fire. Multiply this by the millions of inhabitants, add pollution from cars and smoke from farmers burning vegetation in the countryside, and you get a dark cloud obscuring most Indian cities. The smog was most noticeable from the airplane. Unlike in the US, there isn't much to see during landing. The land below is completely shrouded in a thick opaque brown blanket. City features do not appear until you are almost at ground level. Having said that, this smog is not so bad that it should scare you from visiting this fascinating country. We brought some pollution air masks but didn't end up using them. I didn't even get the scratchy eyes I felt in Shanghai. The main issue with India's smog is the reduced visibility that makes it difficult to enjoy the famous sights, since you can't see them too clearly. Don't count on seeing blue sky during your trip especially in the winter months.

At the Baha'i Lotus temple

After breakfast, we checked in. We were given an option to upgrade to the top floor which gives you access to the Regency club and also complimentary breakfast. The cost of the upgrade was only slightly higher than the cost of breakfast so we went for it. The club offers various small tapa style bites and free drinks during the afternoon happy hour. As we don't like to eat heavy dinner, this way we basically also got complimentary dinner. The room was nice. We took a much needed shower - by now it was around 35 hours since we left our apartment in California - and then headed downstairs to meet the tour guide. We first visited the Lotus temple. This is one of only 9 existing houses of worship for people of the Baha'i faith. The temple is truly majestic from the outside. To further its appearance of a lotus flower, the temple is surrounded by 9 ponds. The inside is however austere - basically it is just a single large open room. Presumably this simple design was chosen to to keep the devotees from getting distracted from their focus on their religious deity. From the temple we next headed to Humayun's Tomb. This is the resting place of one of the emperors of the Muslim Mughal empire that came to rule over most of India between 1520 and 1850. This UNESCO World Heritage site was the first garden-style tomb built in India. It was in a way the first draft of the eventual design used to build the Taj Mahal. On the way back we stopped by the India Gate. We also passed by India's parliament and supreme court buildings. We then headed back to the hotel for the much needed sleep.

At Humayun's Tomb
Delhi's India Gate

The next morning, I broke my maybe a 10 year long streak, and ran few miles on a treadmill. Then after some more sambar, we visited Jama Masjid, one of India's largest mosques. It was built by Shah Jahan, the same Mughal emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. It's a truly astonishing structure. It was interesting seeing how the design of religious buildings seems to indicate something about the central core of each particular belief system. Christian churches feature a mass hall where people go listen to speeches. Hindu temples are full of numerous statues and icons, but there is no central gathering place and no preachers. A mosque is primarily an empty open corridor. Instead outside you have the massive courtyard which can accomodate up to 25,000 worshippers. The massive walls between the two minarets display verses of the Quran. One of the minarets can be climbed for an impressive view of the city. From the mosque we took a bicycle rickshaw to the spice market. Here we learned about different spices and observed Old Delhi residents nonchalantly wash themselves on rooftops in the open. From there we headed to a Sikh gurdwara (temple). Most religious buildings in India require you to remove shoes before entering but here you also have to cover your head. I liked the sense of community. Behind the gurdwara is a hotel where pilgrims can stay for free. Large part of the temple complex is devoted to an industrial-style kitchen where volunteers prepare daily meals presumably for the local poor people. Later we visited a Jain temple. Jains do not believe in a single creator. The earth is eternal and they follow the teachings of 24 saviors known as Tirthankaras. As most of Indians, Jains are vegetarian but they practice an extreme form of it. They don't use any root vegetable that had to be plucked from the ground. I knew that Jain devotees wear all white and cover their mouth to avoid swallowing flies but I didn't know there is another denomination, called Digambara, monks of which do not wear any clothes at all. The only article they carry with them is a broom with peacock feathers used to brush off bugs one could accidentally step on. We then drove past the Red Fort ended the day with a visit to a rug salesman. Although we had absolutely no interest in buying an oriental rug, this visit was actually informative. We learned that these rugs were made from individual pieces of thread tied together. Furthermore, the shade of hand knotted rugs changes depending on the orientation. They are much lighter in one direction than the other. This is not the case with factory-made rugs. We spent that evening enjoying the free cocktails and light fares in the Regency club.

Visiting Delhi's Jama Masjid. The left minaret has an observation tower.
Street views in Old Delhi
At the Old Delhi spice market
At the Sikh Guardwara
A carpet salesman showing us hand knotted rugs

Stop 2: Varanasi (December 29th - December 30th)

The next morning, after another visit to the gym and yet more sambar, we boarded a plane for Varanasi. What's interesting about flying in India is that you need to present a printed copy of your flight reservation to a security personnel just to enter the terminal. It was like this on my visit 10 years ago but I thought that was due to Delhi having the small old airport with limited capacity. But this system is widespread all around the country. We had the printouts in the package provided by Sheesh, but if you were to book your own trips, it's important to print out all the confirmations. Security will often also make everyone show their boarding passes after deplaning at the destination so make sure to keep your boarding passes handy. Another difference is that when you arrive to the airport, you generally first need to go to a baggage screening station to have your bag X-rayed and tagged with an appropriate security sticker before dropping it off at the check in counter. Not all airports are like this, specifically Delhi and Mumbai do not have these external luggage screening stations. This setup does not appear very bulletproof, as additional items could easily be added to the luggage post screening. Hopefully there is some secondary check happening behind the scenes.

Typical street scenes in Varanasi