Vacay!

India is one of the major places I want to visit in my lifetime so I bought the giant Lonely Planet, read it cover-to-cover, and then realized I needed to be there for 6 months to do the place any justice. I only had two weeks so instead of “doing India” I just did Mumbai and its environs. Sorry Delhi, Rajastan, Darjeeling, Chennai, Kolkota—I’ll come back for you someday.

So why Mumbai?  Well for starters the tickets were really cheap via frequent flyer miles (even if Noah and I had to take different flights and meet upon arrival). Also, given the time of year, the South of India seemed like a good bet weather-wise. And yes it’s sort of a cop out to go to a culturally rich place and then bum around on the beach but whatever—I wanted to hang out in Goa.

Now the planning of this trip suffered severely by the fact that I had to go to Uganda and Myanmar twice in the months before, and then had a month of weird little business trips that took me to Liverpool, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, DC and St. Paul.  It didn’t leave a lot of time for doing things like “making hotel and train reservations”.  So flying by the seat of our pants was our strategy.  The idea was vaguely “land in Mumbai, go South”.  I had dreams of making it as far as Kerala, but those were abandoned pretty quickly when I remembered how exhausting travel days are and didn’t want to spend 40 hours on a train both ways.

For future India travelers, if you want to go to specific places on a specific schedule, it behooves you to buy your tickets in advance. We did a version of travel called “we’ll go wherever there are available tickets”. It worked out pretty well for us and forced us to explore parts of the country we hadn’t considered, itinerary-by-chance ended up being a decent strategy.