6/7 - Travel

Hello, today a good subject... Travel in India !

First if you want to go abroad you have to be sure that in your FRRO (not your visa) it's writen "double entry" or "multi entry" if it's "single entry" you can't go abroad.

Holiday: In India there are a lot of holidays, cool! you can travel. I got 1 week off and 1 month holiday in October.

Travel: You can choose where you want to go, the north, the south ? I think there are some places where you can do a trip and some places where you can just stay a week or 3-4 days. Goa, Pondichery, Ooty, Hampi,... are for exemple some places you can just go during a large weeking, or a week. It's quite close to Bangalore

If you want to do a real trip, you can do the south like this:

-Bangalore/Chennai/Puducherry/Madurai/Kanyakumari/Varkala/Periyar Lake/Tekkady/Alapuzzha/Kochi/Munnar/Mysore/Bangalore

(For sure not all of them, you have to choose depending on what you like or what you can do. For exemple you can do a night on the backwaters from Alappuzha to Kochi by boat or choose to go on plantations tea and visit around, or you can do South west one time and then South East an other time).

Or you can do the North, like Rajasthan (North West) or North East like Calcutta, actually you can find some ideas on this website:

goindia.about.com

Personally, I went to Hampi for three days and to Ooty for 3 days. And then I went to Rajasthan for 17 days, I uploaded (just next) my calendar of the Rajasthan trip to give you an idea, it was in this way: Jaipur - Jodhpur - Jaisalmer - Udaipur - Agra - Delhi - Jaipur.

I went with three other people: one expat and two Indians.

The calendar: Link

(If you can't read, download the image, it should more readable)

Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Udaipur were really nice you can stay longer on these places, Agra is "needed" for the Taj but was really bad except Jama Masjid. Delhi was not bad but it's the city's life so it's different from Rajasthan.

Maybe if you do the opposit and finish with Rajasthan it would be better (Delhi - Agra - Udaipur - Jaisalmer - Jodhpur - Jaipur...). Try to check if there are some festivals in cities, it's always nice... for exemple we directly went to Jodhpur to see the Riff festival which was a nice folkloric music festival. If you travel with Indian students from Shristi they will also define what you will see, for exemple a lot of them are from Delhi so a night, or a day, at the family house will be planned to see the family and also to don't pay an hotel.

If you have some time you can go to Goa. You can follow the calendar and then go from Jaipur to Goa to enjoy the beach for 3-4 days and then Goa-Bangalore.

I give you an advice... book only guesthouses and not Hotels it would be more convivial and I could even say better.

The flight ticket was 9000Rs to go and come back, rooms are generally 400Rs/night (double bed) and trains/bus are between 100 and 1000Rs.