To resolve both these problems, we booked a private tour with GAP Adventures. If you find yourself traveling to India and it’s not part of a large tour or school group, we encourage you to try the private tour. We had our own driver for the entire trip in India and in each city we were provided with a local guide to take us around the monuments and explain what we were visiting. It was truly a great, and more importantly, safe way to travel – not to mention, it was reasonably priced.
Traveling in India –
India has some of the craziest traffic we’ve ever seen. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, tuk tuks, camels, oxen, and elephants all share a road. Like other developing countries, piling 20+ people in a tuk tuk is almost an art form, but India’s roads and infrastructure are not well developed (except for big cities like Delhi). What India needs more than anything else are the giant expressways we have in the US with minimum speeds and no intersections. Honking on the road is India is not considered rude, in fact, it’s expected and slower vehicles like trucks or tuk tuks have signs requesting passing vehicles to honk. As you can imagine, it’s a stressful environment to travel in – or it was for us, especially during our 6-hr drives to Agra and then Jaipur.
We did encounter a problem in the airport when leaving Delhi (just in case anyone is interested in visiting). We were expected to check in for our flight before entering the airport, so we couldn’t get into the airport without a boarding pass, but we needed to enter the airport to get to the ticket counter to check-in for our flight (a kind of “catch-22”). We were able to pay an airport employee to print our boarding passes from the airline’s website but in the future, we will be printing from our hotel for free!
The People –
Like other developing countries, the people of India were very curious about us. They stared, asked if they could take pictures of us, and just wanted to be near us. One man even sat next to us while our tour guide was explaining the history of the Mahatma Gandhi memorial. We were a little nervous and concerned about pick-pocketing but spent a few minutes talking with the man (translated by our tour guide, of course), who turned out to be from a small Indian village and was just curious.
As you probably know, India is one of the most populated countries in the world – over 1.2 billion people. While China has tried to control their population, India has tried to help their people understand that having many children does not mean more workers for the farm or the family business; it means more mouths to feed. There really were people everywhere! And there were a lot of people (of all ages) trying to sell us something. In Jaipur, rode an elephant up to the Amber Fort/Palace. There were a few photographers trying to get our attention to take our picture and once we were off the elephant they asked if we would purchase them. We weren’t interested as we had pictures on our own camera so we drove off to the next site. On the road, a motorcycle came up next to our car trying to get our attention – it was the same guys with our pictures on the elephant. We pulled over and our tour guide asked if we were interested – “No, we’re not” – and then told the men we weren’t interested. As we now felt like we were being followed around by men trying to sell us our pictures we were pretty freaked out; too freaked to even view and consider buying the photos. We went about our day, and about 6 hours later, at the end of our day, the men with our photos appeared at another site we were touring! Our tour guide assured us this wasn’t unusual and the men knew the “tourist” spots that we might visit. With some comfort provided by our guide, we were now amused that these men had successfully found us after an entire day and we finally did buy the four photos for $1 USD - mostly to have as proof for this crazy story.
Although some of the richest people in the world live in India, most of the population is very poor. There were some early touring mornings when we saw families still sleeping on the street from the night before. Many children don’t wear pants or clothes and for the most part, a toilet was the “good ol’ outdoors”. Needless to say it’s pretty dirty (again, this is outside of the very developed areas of large cities).
Food & Drink –
The one comment we did hear from our friends, repeatedly, was to be careful what you eat (only cooked veggies, fruits with a peel and no meat) and don’t drink the water. . We stuck to this for the most part but did venture out and tried some meats. We felt comfortable with the food because our driver and tour guides took us to nice, clean restaurants where it was safe to eat the meat. Kate had never tried Indian food before. She thought it would be too spicy for her so we ordered everything “mild.” This means there was still flavor but it wasn’t the famous spicy foods Indians eat. Kate really liked the food! The bread is amazing, too. We were both very lucky and did not get the “Delhi Belly” or upset stomach in India like many of our friends before us. Although Kate did have some stomach cramps coming out of Thailand, it wasn’t anything that kept her from touring and was gone in a few days with over-the-counter medicine.
Overall –
The heat and humidity was almost unbearable. Especially considering we were wearing pants and Kate kept her shoulders covered to respect the culture. (To enter most of the sites, we had to be dressed appropriately, covered up, and had to take off our shoes.) Even the people there all wore pants and long-sleeved shirts. Other than the heat, we really enjoyed our time in India. The sites were amazing, we liked the food, and it was just so different from anywhere else that we had ever been. We would recommend having a personal driver and tour guide to help navigate the city and understand the people and culture. Also, five days seemed to be the perfect amount of time and we were ready to leave the heat by the fifth day.
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