Yes. Day zero. Day zero because I haven’t really gone anywhere yet. But I feel as though my preparation alone was a day’s worth of travel.
First came the more arduous-than-first-glance task of deciding on an itinerary. My sister and I must have gone through at least a dozen iterations. We explored routes that would take us to the Periyar Tiger Reserve and Hampi, to Emily’s town of Dharwad and even a route through North India’s famed Golden Triangle. We finally decided on traveling south down the west coast of India from Mumbai to Kochin and ending in New Delhi and the Taj Mahal. The process of finalizing our plans took about four months. It didn’t help that my sister and I have completely different styles of traveling. I am a highly organized advance planner. For example, before Becky and I went to Turkey a few years ago, I created a day by day Excel spreadsheet which listed each of our planned activities and sites to visit each day. We carried this with us throughout the vacation and pretty much stuck to it. My sister travels by the seat of her pants and usually just counts on things to work out once she gets there. It can therefore be very difficult for two such travelers to agree on things. And, India is not the easiest place to do advance planning for, which definitely stressed me out in the beginning. But, we compromised and agreed to plan which places to visit, but not necessarily decide exactly what we would do each day or which hotel we were definitely staying in until a day or two before.
Here is my final itinerary:
3/5 – Arrive in Mumbai at 11:50pm
3/6 – Mumbai
3/7 – Mumbai. Overnight train to Goa.
3/8 – Arrive in Goa at 7am.
3/9 – Goa
3/10 – Goa. Train to Udupi at 8pm. Arrive in Udupi at 11:30pm.
3/11 – Udupi. Overnight train to Kochin.
3/12 – Arrive in Kochin at 10am
3/13 – Kochin
3/14 – Kochin. Fly to New Delhi at 2:10pm. Arrive in New Delhi at 6:30pm.
3/15 – Agra
3/16 – New Delhi. Fly back to Boston at 1:45am on 3/17.
Next came the visa. Although advertised to be $70, the final cost came to over $150 after paying the third party processing fee and the shipping costs.
A visit to the travel doctor brought with it a long conversation about my substantial fear of getting sick during my vacation. We talked about malaria and traveler’s diarrhea. Three shots (typhoid, hepatitis A, and a polio booster), a $20 co-pay, and $130 worth of malaria meds, Ambien, and “stomach stuff” later, I was good to go.
And then there was the packing. Based on our itinerary of overnight trains and almost constant travel, a large suitcase seemed impossible to deal with. Even a small rolling carry-on seemed like it would be difficult to manage. So, I packed my belongings for thirteen days in a daypack-sized backpack. Yes, you read that right! My trick was to pack everything in 2.5 gallon ziplock bags – a trick I had recently read about in Budget Travel. It’s amazing how much you can fit when you can squeeze all the air out of it! I packed each ziplock strategically: one ziplock contained my “going home” outfit for the twenty-eight hour journey back to Boston; another contained my two pairs of pants and six t-shirts; a third had my socks, bras, and underwear; and so on. It worked amazingly well! Check it out!
I’m on the plane to Amsterdam now and then onward to Mumbai.
The adventure begins.
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