Due to the 2009 Oscar®-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, the country’s rise among the world’s economies, and the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in late 2008, India has been very much in the international spotlight lately. The movie, of course, was rather controversial—and no more so than in India, where many people felt it painted a wrong picture of the country. But when Gail and I saw it, our reaction was, “Wow! Great movie!” Seeing it did nothing but heighten our interest in visiting this vast country, which has been on our “get-to” list for a long time. As for the terrorist attacks, I consider those random acts; no such violence or risk has ever dissuaded me from pursuing my “must-see” destinations. So, when we were invited to India’s biggest international travel trade show in Delhi last April, we sprang at the opportunity and used it as a launching point for seeing some of the most distinctive parts of the country.
We turned to the real India experts, Cox & Kings, for help in planning our trip (see “Planning = Payoff,” below). They’ve been doing this since 1785 during the “Raj period,” when England ruled India and Mr. Cox contracted to English troops back and forth between countries. Our journey included the Golden Triangle cities of of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur—the typical tour for most first-timers to India—but we also included Jodhpur and Udaipur in order to get a comprehensive overview of the desert kingdoms of Rajasthan, India’s most historic and colorful region. Finally, we said farewell to India with a couple of days in Mumbai.
The average traveler needs a solid plan and local help to get around India, which became readily apparent on the ride from the airport to the center of Delhi. Getting around in India is like dealing with organized chaos. I’m a pretty fearless driver, but I would never dream of tackling its overcrowded roads with their confusion, apparent lack of rules of the road, and odd mix of road warriors—bikes, motor bikes, auto rickshaws, donkey carts, camels, and more. Plus, while English is the language of business, government, and education, only about seven percent of India’s population, mostly in urban areas, speaks English fluently.
Our visit to the South Asia Travel and Tourism Exchange was a real eye-opener, a great opportunity to learn about all the varied travel experiences to be enjoyed throughout India. But that’s insight for another story. India, stretching from the Himalayas to its southern tip, is a vast country about one-third the size of the U.S., with great variations in topography, language, religion, and local cultures. You can’t possibly experience it all in just one trip.
Sadly, we were so consumed by our travel conference that we had only one afternoon to sample Delhi itself. But what an interesting afternoon that was! Intrepid Tours, an Australian-based company we met with at the trade show, organized an impromptu mini-tour of Old Delhi with our guide, a bright and energetic young man from Punjab. He took us there by metro and showed us around a Sikh temple during prayers, where we also saw meal prep for the 3,000-plus people they feed free-of-charge daily. We dodged people, motorcycles, and bikes in the narrow alleys of the colorful and aromatic spice market, all the while getting an introduction to the religions and culture of the country and the sights, smells, and sounds of the city. Needless to say, we were overwhelmed by the crowds and confusion, except—surprisingly—on Delhi’s modern metro, which is clean, comfortable, and very well organized. People even queued better than in London!
The Rest of the Triangle
The next morning at dawn we were off to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal (pronounced Taj Ma-HELL; Taj meaning crown, and Mahal meaning palace). This entailed a two-hour ride on the Shatabdi Express, reputed to be India’s speediest and most comfortable train. The station was pandemonium. Thankfully, our guide with Cox & Kings nabbed a couple of porters and whisked us and our luggage through the crowds, escorting us to the “first-class” front section of the train. It was no TGV, AVE, or even Acela, but it was comfortable and relatively speedy as it passed through villages and flat, parched fields where farmers winnowed wheat by hand. They even served an ersatz breakfast of cornflakes with hot milk, tea, and other goodies.
The Taj Mahal is the quintessential icon of India. It is so overexposed that, frankly, I had little interest in seeing it in person. Big mistake! No matter how many photos you’ve seen of the Taj Mahal, none do it justice. Setting aside the romantic story surrounding it—built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan as an expression of love for his favorite wife—it is the sheer feat of architecture, engineering, labor, and craftsmanship that leaves you awestruck, not to mention the setting and beautiful gardens. This marvel was created in the mid-17th century (i.e., no cranes or forklifts), with a workforce of 1,000 elephants hauling all that white marble 200 miles and 20,000 men who took almost 20 years to build and decorate it with stunning inlay work. We toured the Taj Mahal on a Sunday at sunset—when it was rather crowded, mostly with Indian families—and again at sunrise on Monday. I’d do it just once and at sunrise, when the air is clearer and you have the place virtually to yourself.
The other primary sights to see in Agra are the mini-Taj Mahal, a half-size predecessor that is impressive itself until you see the real thing, and Agra’s Red Fort, a massive walled city that was the seat of the Mughal Empire for many generations. But what we found the most interesting were demonstrations by local shops in the arts of rug-making and marble inlay work, both crafts passed down from generation to generation since ancient times.
From Agra, we were driven cross-country for almost seven hours—thankfully, in a private car—to Jaipur. We stopped once to visit Fatehpur Sikri, the deserted sandstone city built by the Mughal Emperor Akbar as his capital in the late-16th century. It is an eerie scene, a near perfectly preserved ghost city that at the time was larger than London, but which was abandoned shortly after it was built because local wells ran dry.
It was a pleasure to relax that evening in the garden compound of The Oberoi Rajvilas, take a swim in their atmospheric pool, settle into a cozy suite, and have a romantic candlelight dinner, alfresco, in the main courtyard to the strains of Indian music.
Jaipur, the “Pink City,” is a big and bustling center, the capital of Rajasthan. If anything, it seemed busier and more chaotic than Delhi. Here, we experienced one of the highlights of our trip, an elephant ride up the switchback road to Amber Fort, with its miles-long crenulated walls and battlements circling the top of an arid ridge. An army of elephants with their mahuts (drivers) was waiting at the base to take us “typical tourists” up to the spectacular fort. Some animals had intricate paintings covering their heads and trunks—quite a scene! Our tour of Amber Fort was followed by a tour of the exquisite City Palace complex with its beautiful gardens and courtyards containing a fantastic collection of armory, costumes, carpets, and miniature paintings. Next up, the Jantar Mantar, an outdoor astronomical observatory built in the early 1700s, with monumental sundials that still give precise measurements of time, plus instruments that measure the declination of the Sun, the placement of constellations, the timing of eclipses, and other astronomical phenomena. Considering the era, the science brought to bear in this creation was quite fantastic.
India’s Desert Plains
From Jaipur we flew to Jodhpur, arriving just in time for a late afternoon tour of the Meherangarh Fort, built on a 400-foot-high dome overlooking Jodhpur and the dramatic desert surrounding it. Jodhpur is known as the “Blue City;” many of its houses are painted lavender blue, signifying they are owned by families of the Brahmin caste. I have to admit that, by this point, when faced with more hoofing it around another palace/fort, I was less than enthusiastic. This trip was beginning to remind me of the “Grand Tour” of Europe I took with my parents way back in my teens, which seemed like a succession of one visit after another to cathedrals and museums, to the point that I was ready to revolt. But as we traveled from one Rajasthan city to another, the palaces and forts each were different enough and kept getting better enough that they did hold our interest.
That said, the highlight of our visit to Jodhpur was no doubt our stay at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, a Taj five-star hotel. This immense palace, the largest private residence in the world, was built in the 1930s by the Maharaja of Jodphur as a sort of “economic stimulus package” to put the unemployed craftsmen of the area to work during hard economic times. It is a very symmetrical, formal, and I would even say austere building, designed and largely furnished in Art Deco style and therefore somewhat out of place. But it is quite spectacular, and if you’re visiting Jodhpur, a stay here is a must.
Along the way to Udaipur, our last stop in Rajasthan, we visited the roadside shop of a master weaver of dhurries, the famous woven carpets of India. And as a break from forts and palaces, we took a desert jeep safari where we saw gazelle, black bucks, and huge blue bulls, then visited a family compound of desert dwellers who practice strict vegetarianism. We even partook of a village ritual that involved the ceremonial brewing and sipping of opium tea. Further along, we visited a spectacular and very active Jain temple and traversed some of the prettiest mountain and agricultural lands and villages of our visit.
India has some fantastic heritage and luxury hotels, and we checked out as many as we could on this visit—more than we can discuss in this brief overview. Probably our favorite hotel, or at least the most romantic, was the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to think so. The hotel was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy and was featured prominently in the James Bond thriller, Octopussy. It sits on an island in the middle of Lake Pichola, several hundred yards from shore, and is reached only by boat. That alone, in our view, makes it special. We were greeted at a very elegant, shoreside reception area and dock, then boated the five minutes to the hotel. As with most top hotels in India, you are welcomed with the namaste (the ritual formal greeting with hands folded under the chin as in prayer), the tika ceremony (a smudge of red dye on the forehead), a garland of aromatic flowers, iced towels, and a refreshing drink. The public spaces and rooms here were luxurious, each with a view out in one direction or another over the lake, and the suites were downright hedonistic. When we arrived at sunset, the lake was alive with what we took to be large black birds lazily swooping over the water—only to discover they were large fruit bats. It was an eerie and haunting scene, but somehow appropriate for this exotic place.
It isn’t easy to sum up our first experience with India. It certainly is exotic, in many dimensions. But I also found it confounding. The dichotomies of India are quite striking: the amazing wealth, the abject poverty, the modernity in the midst of highly traditional values, the multiplicity of its religions, languages, and regional influences. Yet, this country of more than a billion people seems to function more or less smoothly. India’s people are certainly one of its main attractions, amazingly welcoming and willing to discuss their heritage, religions, culture, and family life. If there is one thing I regret, it’s that our trip was so rushed, we didn’t have the chance to fully appreciate what the areas we visited had to offer, and that we missed sampling other, very different regions and experiences of this intriguing, incredible country.
Planning = Payoff
India is not a destination for a spur-of-the-moment trip. It takes some planning to get the most from your adventure. It’s also not a destination where we’d recommend the “do-it-yourself” approach, even for very experienced travelers, as we are. To help us plan our sojourn and get around, we enlisted the help of Cox & Kings, the oldest and most experienced tour operator not only in India, but in the world.
Planning our tour took the better part of three months. It can be done faster, when working with an experienced tour operator like Cox & Kings. We wanted to pack a lot into a little time—about ten days—and we needed to inspect lots of hotels and have some scheduling independence to see sights the average traveler might not. That meant opting for a privately guided, custom trip—our own car, driver, and guides, all of whom were excellent! We would highly recommend this approach to touring India if you want to travel on your own schedule and have the most intimate introduction to India—and Cox & Kings will work within most any budget to create a trip you can afford.
Don't forget that India requires a visitor’s visa for U.S. citizens, and you should consult with a good health clinic at least two weeks before your departure for immunizations and appropriate travel medicines. By the way, we ate lots of Indian food in many different settings with no noteworthy adverse reaction.
Check out Mike's tips for a top-notch, hassle-free India trip.
Read my blow-by-blow account of our wanderings through India and the hotels we enjoyed when you check out my “Trip Notes in the Rough.”
If you’d like the intriguing visual approach, view my colorful India slideshow.
July 2009