India (2003)

Holidays and short breaks
Argentina (2001)
Chile (2002)
India (2003)
World trip (2005-2006)
Libya (2008)

Pictures
1 Croydon to Delhi
2 Agra
3 Jaipur
4 Jaipur & Udaipur
5 The Maharana of Mewar
6 Ranakpur
7 Udaipur & Delhi
8 Darjeeling
9 Darjeeling
10 Darjeeling
11 Chennai
12 Tirupati
13 Mahabalipuram
14 Mahabalipuram
15 Chennai
16 Bangalore
17 Mangalore
18 My big fat Indian wedding
19 Murdeshwar
20 Slow train to Kochi
21 Allapuzha, backwaters
22 Backwaters and Kochi
23 Kochi to Delhi
24 Delhi to London

India

So, having done two big trips over the previous two years, where could we go in 2003? We had not really given it much thought, and family + jobs had pre-occupied us. But then Deepak invited us to his "Big Fat Indian Wedding" and that got us thinking about making a proper journey around India and end up at Deepak and Nandu's wedding in Mangalore on 14 December.

A lot of reading and planning went into our India trip, and the more we read about India, the more bewildering, exotic, mysterious and vast it seemed to become. Although there was a definite "tourist trail", not all that many tourist were going to India these days (9/11 was offered as the main reason). Whilst we knew that India would be a very different experience from Argentina and Chile, we had simply no concept of how busy and demanding India would be. Stefan had even thoughts of hiring a car and driving ourselves, abandoned after 30 seconds of Indian traffic chaos!

Now, more than a year since we visited India, it has somehow got under our skin. It was also a good "warmer-upper" for our world travel plans.

Again, we booked flights, trains (yippee!) and hotels in advance, with the help of Jaya Arora at Travelbag.

Diary

As we did in Chile, we both kept diaries and scribbled away furiously until our wrists ached. And as with the Chile section, the links point to Stefan's diary, as we haven't typed up Nessie's yet, but we'll try and do the same and place the finished diaries in columns side by side.

Click on a highlighted date to go straight to that day's entry or use the links on the left.

Books, Films, Music, Links, etc.

For more references, check our links section.
•	The Guide and Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan
•	Shortened modern prose versions of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, R.K. Narayan
•	An Introduction to Hinduism by Gavin Flood
•	Jogger's Park, cheesy film, fantastic.
•	Monsoon Wedding, beautifully filmed and characterised, a feast
•	The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
•	Selected Short Stories, by Rabindranath Tagore, the "grand master of Bengali culture."

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