Our trip to India
Fall 2005

[Start] [Delhi] [Agra] [Taj Mahal] [Fatehpur Sikri] [Jaipur] [Wrap Up]

I took advantage of a planned business trip to India (Bangalore) that was for two weeks and decided to extend my stay - having Michelle fly out and meet me. Over the next 10 days, we visited Goa for 3 days, then flew to Delhi to do the "Golden Triangle" of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur.

Too often, people take trips and post hundreds of photos. For me, looking at photos gives context for the story the person tells me. In the old days, you would sit down next to someone and they would go through the pictures, telling you the story behind the pictures.

In this day & age, with the internet, this is a little bit harder to do, but I will try my best. Don't get scared away by all this text you're seeing right now. There are tons of pics. Just scroll down & hit the various page links if you don't believe me.

What does one think of when India is mentioned? No doubt the Pakistan / India conflict will come to mind as it's story is refreshed annually by the news conglomerates. The fact there is a more than a billion people living in India is hard to escape. Outsourcing seems to be a popular topic right now. If you're one to read the international section in the paper, it seems when accidents or natural disasters happen in India, hundreds if not thousands die - I hope no one has forgotten the Bopal Disaster.  Oh, and some tidbits from your early childhood education will creep in. Small facts like America was discovered because they were trying to find a direct route to India for the spice trade. Does the name Gandhi ring a bell?

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that we all have preconcieved notions of what India is. By and large, when I mentioned I was going to take a vacation in India, outside of my India friends and co-workers, people didn't seem too thrilled of the prospect.

Prior to 2001/2002, I would have been in the same camp. It is not a destination most people think of when they are putting together their top-ten vacation destinations. However, as part of my work, I get to work with several people from India and one particularly tall white guy who has spent a lot of time in India visiting the country. So I don't have to type "particularly tall white guy" a lot, let's just call him Brian. Anyway, Brian has visited India on many occasions and when he left his day job several years ago, he traveled all over the east and spent more time in India than any other country. And he told great stories with wonderful pictures. He even has a blog you can read. His eyes lit up as he went through the tattered pages of his Lonely Planet guide and I swear I could see him salivate as he looked at the restaurants circled in his guide book.

At the time, I also happened to manage several people from India, although they lived in the US. They went back annually or bi-annually, spending all of their vacation in one large block, back in India. Through their stories and pictures, I started to get interested.

Then this past year, as part of a reorganization, I began co-managing a team of around 15 people in Bangalore. It was destiny! I was going to India!

It just so happened that on my very first trip to India back in April/May of 2005 for business, Brian was there and I had asked him to set up a 2-day siteseeing tour near Bangalore over the weekend. We visited several temples and small towns outside of Bangalore - culminating with Mysore where we spent the night. We had hired a driver so we got to experience the roadway system of India up close and personal. I guess the seed had been planted because I wanted to see more.

Oh, did I mention on this first trip that my wife Michelle really wanted to go with me and was disappointed that it happend on such short notice? She has seen this TV special on India and it really got her yearning for a trip over there.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I had another business trip planned in the fall and we were lucky enough to bribe our respective parents to watch our kids so we could both be gone for several weeks.

Ok, so enough of the pre-amble, here is my story of our trip to India.

Bangalore

Bangalore is the IT city of India. Ten years ago, there were 10-20 companies that had set up shop. Today over 2,000 companies have offices in Bangalore. The downside to all of this of course is that in those 10 years, nothing has been done to the airport nor the roads. This means that during normal daylight hours, it can take over an hour to go 20kms. What is a 2-lane road is jammed with 4 lanes of traffic, comprised of busses, trucks, cars, tons of motorcycles and a flotsam of auto-rickshaws and hordes of bicyclists. There is an incessant honking as drivers negotiate for the smallest opening between vehicles. I stayed in the Oberoi, a 5-star hotel. It is a fantastic hotel and I would recommend it to anyone travelling to Bangalore.

While I was in Bangalore for almost 2-weeks, most of this was work related and Michelle arrived on a late-night flight on Thursday. Since we were leaving for Goa the next day, we only had time for some short shopping over on Commercial Street. It's a jam-packed area with tons of shops. We took a auto-rickshaw over there to do some shopping. I had been there the previous weekend and had found a antique shop where I had bought some old single-barrel collapsing telescopes (sometimes called spyglasses - the ones used on ships) and wanted to pick up one for my dad. These were some really cool old telescopes, dated from 1814, 1910. A bargain at 750 rupees (almost $20 US a piece). As we got there about 10:00am, many of the shops hadn't quite opened, but Michelle did manage to get a nice "silver" choker necklace at a small shop.

Interesting Tidbit: When you ask the average Indian living in Bangalore what their biggest complaint is, they will almost always answer that the government is full of crooks and liars. This is because of promises of new roads / infrastructure / airports that never materialize.

Goa

We spent 3 days in Goa. We had planned on spending some time on the beaches and doing one day of site-seeing, but the weather gods were not cooperating. It was raining as we landed. We were staying at the Cicade De Goa, an "advertised" 5-star hotel. It was a 3-star at best.

The best part of Goa was our tour we took of the surrounding area, including the the capital city Panaj and the nearby spice plantations. I never knew that Vasco De Gama had "discovered" India by landing right here at Goa in 1591 and for hundreds of years, up until 1961, Goa was a Portuguese colony. Our tour guide's father was one of the freedom fighters that evicted Portugal from India.

During the tour, we saw many old catholic churches. I am not a Catholic, but the "Basilica of Bom Jesus" church (above) holds the remains of St Francis Xavier, who was missionarry in many countries throughout the east. He was cannonized in 1622, over a year after his death because his body "was as fresh as the day he died"..His remains are in a glass coffin in this church (minus a few appendages - notably an arm which is in the Vatican).

Interesting Tidbit: When the Portuguese landed & took over Goa, they demolished nearly all of the temples, using the stone to rebuild the catholic churches on the same ground the temples stood. This is something that I find very distasteful - in the same vein as the Taliban did when they destroyed the huge Buddha's in Afganistan.

There are a LOT of old churches in Goa. Probably the most interesting at least to me was St Augustine. It was a huge church at one time with only parts remaining standing today. Below is a nice shot of the tower.

Throughout the remains are lots of what I take were headstones set into the floor and some intricate carvings, all done in Latin. Kind of made me want to learn Latin.

The spice plantations were really amazing. You do not see "neat & tidy" rows of plants growing. It is like a jungle, and absent the hand dug trenches that carry water, it would hard to identify them as such. The reason is the method of "farming" is really using the various plants and trees harmoniously together. The anchor tenant, at least in Goa, is the "BetalNut" Palm, which the nut is used as a mild narcotic by many people in India. This tree's trunk is used as a trellis for a variety of other spices and the canopy provides shelter for others. It was interesting listening to the description of all the spices, as not only did these spices taste good, but they are almost always identified by some homeopathic remedy for some ailment. We had a wonderful lunch with some spicy drink and also sampled the infamous goan "feni". Whooooo Boy! 

One day at lunch, we were eating on the beach a ways north of our hotel, and as I looked out to the Arabian Sea, I oriented myself and thought "Pakistan is just up there...over that horizon is Iraq and the Middle east". I really was on the opposite side of the world.

Next up is Delhi.

[Start] [Delhi] [Agra] [Taj Mahal] [Fatehpur Sikri] [Jaipur] [Wrap Up]