Getting ready for another Odyssey.

We're off again. This time our big trip is to the sights, colours and smells of India. 
We will fly from Calgary via Frankfurt to Delhi, leaving on the 27th of January and arriving at 1:30 am on the 29th. The journey alone is exhausting even to think about, not to mention the 12 hours jetlag which we will have to deal with rapidly before we join our tour group later that day.
I guess that is why this is a "trip" not a "holiday"!

Being somewhat daunted by the size of the Lonely Planet guidebook and the size of the sub-continent, let alone the famous- infamous- bureaucracy around getting Visas, tickets, accommodation, etc etc etc, we decided this time to let a Travel Agent do the work for us. The Adventure Travel company in Halifax has so far been an excellent choice. 
The original plan was to relinquish our independent travel urges in favour of a guided tour for the northern part of India including the Taj Mahal, Varanasi and other major places. We thought this would give us a feel for how to handle the southern part on our own. So, with that in mind we booked a 22 day tour starting in Delhi and ending in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). This is with an Australian tour co. who specialize in small groups, max 12 in this case, of adventure travellers who simply want someone who can deal with tickets, rooms etc. The accommodation will be a mix of 2-3 star hotels, homestays, sleeper trains, and the travel will be by public transit rather than coaches. All this sounds ideal for how we like to travel, and added to that is the unstructured nature of the time spent at each destination.
Next on the agenda was to plan our southern India portion and to get our shots and that infamous Visa.

Shots were easy enough (though certainly not inexpensive) at the Travel Clinic in the city. Visas, despite a huge amount of cursing at the 4 websites all giving different snippets of vital info, and the on-line forms that kept disappearing and wanting such obscure/irrelevant info as our grandfathers' date/place of birth, and again costing plenty, also came through in timely fashion much to our amazement and delight.
Then came the evening we sat down with the tome and the laptop and planned our fortnight down south, and getting there from Kolkata too. Hours later it all looked like a plan....until I, Mary, announced "I'm calling the agency in the morning and booking the South tour package too!" What a relief to make that decision. Now I only have to figure out what to pack.......

The spanner in the packing works is the fact that (maybe you noticed at the top?) we are flying to Delhi out of Calgary. That is because we want to see Rio, and his family and relatives too, of course, before  too long. On the 14th we fly to Calgary and do a bit of skiing with Nathalie, my sister and the bro-in-law, Greg then spend a week in Golden with Caimin, Tessa and Rio, hopefully we'll ski there too. Since we don't want to/cannot take ski and winter gear with us to India we will have to pack stuff we can leave and hopefully not need when we arrive home mid-March. Oh yes, also there are a pile of Christmas presents for Rio which we will be taking too.

Winter  will be a distant memory.......but see the new planting bed that will be awaiting new plants when we return.