Category: India
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Traveling Through 2020 (Part 1)
I thought about making a new “year end” post every year. Even up until today I thought I had only missed on year of these but it looks like the last one was in 2013. Yikes. It’s funny to start this back up again in a year which looked to be my biggest year of…
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Where I Slept: Thiruvananthapuram, India
Thiruvananthapuram, India | 30 January, 2007 | $9.04 I’m not sure why this hotel was so expensive, perhaps because Thiruvananthapuram is the capital of Kerala? The town has some nice colonial architecture and grand universities to wander around. With a whole day to wander around I ran errands (like buying soap) and getting passport photos…
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Where I Slept: Madurai, India
Madurai, India | 28 January, 2007 | $4.52 Madurai was fascinating! This was my first real taste of the chaos and jumbled, statue-covered temples of Tamil Nadu. After seven hours on the bus I was ready to get a look at the temple. Meenakshi Sundareswar Temple is like nothing I had ever seen before. In…
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Where I Slept: Kanyakumari, India
Kanyakumari, India | 27 January, 2007 | $5.65 Finally, I made it to the end—the Southern tip of India. After leaving Kerala, and certainly after leaving Varkala Beach, I encountered few Western tourists. Southern India has a vastly different feel than the North and I hope everyone traveling to India has time to experience both.…
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Where I Slept: Varkala Beach, India
Varkala Beach, India | 25 January, 2007 | $5.65 Another three nights on the beach, still recovering from India before diving back into the big cities. Varkala is really interesting because the town, hotels and restaurants sit atop a high cliff, and visiting the beach requires climbing down the cliff. Aside from a few chair…
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Where I Slept: Alleppey, India
Alleppey, India | 23 January, 2007 | $6.77 Alleppey was really just a one night stopover on my way South, but I stumbled upon some interesting sights. While walking on the edge of town after a self-made tour of the colonial canals running through town, I saw a large field of military or police officers…
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Where I Slept: Kochi, India
Kochi, India | 22 January, 2007 | $6.77 Heading further South along India’s West coast, Fort Kochin and Kochi are solidly in the Kerala region. I attended a Kathakali performance put on for tourists which has been shortened for the Western attention span. Coming to the theater early is a special treat, because you can…
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Where I Slept: Palolem – Kockin, India
Palolem – Kochi, India | 20 January, 2007 | $9.21 (sleeper train) This train must have been pretty unremarkable since I didn’t bother to record how long the trip took. Perhaps after four nights on the beach I was too relaxed (or antsy) to care.
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Where I Slept: Palolem Beach, India
Palolem Beach, India | 18 January, 2007 | $5.64 How cute, my own little cabin on stilts! The markets around the beach in Goa cater to the want-to-be hippie crowd, full of sarongs, toe rings and patchwork bags. It’s fun to look at first, until you start to realize it’s the same mass-produced skirts and…
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Where I Slept: Panaji, Old Goa, India
Panaji, Old Goa, India | 15 January, 2007 | $5.64 I arrived in Old Goa during daylight hours and found another tourist to share a rickshaw from the train station. The driver was happy to take us to a hotel, but when we got out he asked for an astronomical amount for the ride. I…
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Where I Slept: Mumbai #2, India
Mumbai, India | 12 January, 2007 | $11.24 My last two nights in Mumbai were spent in a tiny, overpriced cinder block hotel room. I had grown accustomed to my own bathroom in India, even in rooms half this price. Mumbai was different. More photos of Mumbai can be seen in the gallery.
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Where I Slept: Mumbai, India
Mumbai, India | 9 January, 2007 | $20.56 Last year I fell behind on my “Where I Slept” series and jumped from Aurangabad, India to Ethiopia, leaving out January through March. Here’s where I fill in the blanks. This hotel room was the cleanest I stayed at in India and one of the most difficult…
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Where I Slept: Aurangabad – Mumbai, India
Aurangabad – Mumbai, India | 8 January, 2007 | $13.33 (hard sleeper train) Indian sleeper trains must be shocking to anyone who hasn’t traveled outside of the U.S. before but I got used to the hard surfaces (and people trying to sit on my legs while I slept) after a few rides. India is a…
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Where I Slept: Aurangabad, India
Aurangabad, India | 7 January, 2007 | $6.67 The Ellora caves near Aurangabad were much more impressive than the Ajanta caves because of the huge scale of the carvings. In both cases the attractions were crowded with visitors and lacking any serious security. I’m more concerned with the Ajanta cave painting surviving years of curious…
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Where I Slept: Jaigon, India
Jaigon, India | 6 January, 2007 | $4.45 I was only looking for a place to stay in-between visiting the Ellora and Ajanta caves and saw little of Jaigon. It doesn’t seem to be a place worth stopping but this hotel room was odd in it’s sterile modernity. More photos of the Ajanta caves can…
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Where I Slept: Ahmedabad, India
Train from Ahmedabad, India | 5 January, 2007 | $5.67 (train ride) I stopped in Ahmedabad specifically to visit a textile museum (and it was worth it) but managed to make some friends along the way. More photos of everyday life in Ahmedabad can be seen in the gallery.
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Where I Slept: Mt. Abu, India
Mt. Abu, India | 2 January, 2007 | $6.67 I woke up early on new year’s day and took a bus into the mountains to Mt. Abu, a vacation spot for locals more than foreign tourists. Before I saw my first temple of 2007 I had fallen off the back of a truck and flat…
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Where I Slept: Udaipur, India
Udaipur, India | 31 December, 2006 | $6.67 On the road you run into a lot of towns that have their own “claim to (Western) fame,” often based on a Hollywood movie. Udaipur is very proud of it’s cameo in the 1983 Bond film Octopussy and every hotel in town seems to offer free movie…
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Where I Slept: Thar Desert #2, India
Thar Desert, India | 25 December, 2006 | $10 (Camel tour) Slowly waking up on a sand dune while the sun rises in the distance, trying to stay warm under a heavy, smelly camel blanket made for a special Christmas morning. Christmas night was the same as the last—our small group sitting around the fire,…
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Where I Slept: Thar Desert, India
Thar Desert, India | 24 December, 2006 | $10 (Camel tour) Sui and I decided to take off toward the border with Pakistan for the holidays. Along with a few other tourists we spent three days traveling (slowly) by camel across the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. Going to sleep Christmas Eve on a sand dune,…