A Passage to India

One of my resolutions for Year 2011 is traveling.

For almost 2 years (since my return from Singapore), I have been tightening my belt and save every nickel and penny for my house renovation. That's not counting the many years ever since I was a little girl with a big dream, started saving money to buy my dream house. It's now under renovation. InsyAllah, we will move in this April.

With that, I could unfreeze my traveling plan!

A passage to India would be a great treat for me after years of hard work, sacrifices and patience.

Actually, I've been saying to myself and friends to visit China. However, a friend of mine mentioned that he planned to travel to India. Since India is also in my list, I don't mind to put it first over China, which I can plan after India trip.

Well, my short list so far looks like this:
1) India
2) China
3) Middle East
4) Europe

A Passage to India

We are planning for a 10 or more backpacking trip to India next year. So, this year is the year of planning :-) Yes... it's still a long way to go. But, at least we can start with something and hopefully we can materialize the plan, insyAllah :-)

I have quite a number of Indian friends because I worked in an Indian company for 5 years! Friends from Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad (my ex-company headquarter), Bangalore, Gujarat, Mumbai, Kolkata and many more. I hope I can meet up with some of them over there although most of them are working abroad, away from India. We'll see who's lucky!

Frankly, I know nothing about the geography of India, what's in the north and what's in the south. I never really study India map for real. Only last week, I browsed India map and getting to know the places. All this time, I just hearing the name of places and never really know which part of India they belong to.

Getting to know the places is the first step in the planning so that we know where to go and what to see or do.

India is a huge colorful country and full of diversity in terms of climates, geography, language, culture, religion etc.



One can find white carpeted mountains of snow and lush forest of pines and maple in the beautiful Kashmir on further North or Mount Himalaya in North East.

Amazingly, one can also find blazing, arid and vast sand dunes on the desert landscape of Rajasthan, North West of India.



In general comparison, North India has seasonal climate (winter, summer or pre-monsoon season, Moonsoon or rainy season and Post-monsoon season), mostly speak Hindi, people have fair skin color and atta (whole wheat flour) is their staple food.
Whereas in South India, it has tropical climate with little difference between the summer and winter temperature. During summer season, temperature of some places may reach as high as 42 degrees centigrade. Many people speak Tamil or Telegu and have darker skin color. They take rice as their staple food. South India is pretty much similar to Malaysia or perhaps hotter.

Taj Mahal, one of the 7 Wonders of the World is in Agra, Uttar Pradesh of North India. India is full of monuments, palaces, forts, temples, mosques and museums.



However, Mumbai (aka Bombay) alone I find interesting on its own. 3 places in Mumbai which stand out to be unique and different to me are Dhobi Ghat, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Chor Bazaar.

Dhobi Ghat is termed as the world's largest outdoor laundry. The washers locally known as Dhobis work in open to wash the clothes from Mumbai's hotels and hospitals. There are row upon row of open-air concrete wash pens, each fitted with its own flogging stone.



Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (aka Victoria Terminus) is one of the busiest railway stations in India, and serves Central Railway trains terminating in Mumbai as well as the Mumbai Suburban Railway. At noon, you can watch its famed dabbawallas deliver more than 200,000 hot lunches prepared by housewives for their husbands working in the office. I once watched this on National Geographic. Particularly impressive is their efficient system – Forbes magazine has calculated its accuracy to one error per six million transactions.

Chor Bazaar: "Chor" is in Hindi which means thieves. "Bazaar" is Persian word, also known in Malay, Hindi, Turkish and Greek which means market. Together they make out "thieves market". Originally, it was called Shor Bazaar meaning "noisy market" but "shor" became "chor" because of how the British mispronounced the word. Eventually stolen goods started finding their way into the market, resulting in it living up to its new name! These days it's famous for antique and vintage items.

Some options we can consider are:

Delhi -> Agra – > Jaipur
- The famous Golden Triangle Delhi - Agra - Jaipur.

Delhi -> Agra -> Jaipur -> Jodhpur -> Jaisalmer
- I would love to go to Jaisalmer for the desert dunes and domes.

Mumbai -> Gujarat -> Jaipur -> Agra -> Delhi
- Start from the busy city of Mumbai, move up to Gujarat, Jaipur, Agra and finally end at Delhi

Well, there's still a lot of time to browse and plan :-)
Gosh... I'm very excited!