Musings on Travel - 1

A bridge across the Ganges in Rishikesh



Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar

For the longest time in my late teens, I quite abhorred the idea of travel. My idea of travelling then, of what little I was forced into, was to go to a place, check into a hotel and flip furiously through what movies were there in the hotel collection and spend hours patiently  running through them. A quick dash for food around the corner and a stroll around a couple of blocks surrounding the office/hotel/ neighbourhood and I was a satisfied soul. My first brush with the idea of travel was reading some glossy magazine articles of some lucky sod scampering around some godsmackingingly beautiful landscapes, gulping down some delicious food and coolly mixing with the locals, all at the same time, with not a hair out of place. Even after completing a management degree, I hadn't done much travelling, apart from the mandatory-coming-of-age-Goa trip. Amazing time, that though! But, by then I had just met my intrepid traveler wife who was traipsing up and down the country thanks to the nomadic  

Temples of Khajuraho in the night

nature of her work. Because of her, I began finding myself in situations which I did not know existed before -- hustling with ticket checkers for a berth on an overnight train, finding out for the difference between a RAC, a WC, 3 Tier, etc etc. The upshot. -- Bharuch, Bangalore, Yercaud, Ahmedabad, Udaipur. I slowly began appreciating the small things in travel rather than focussing on getting from Point x to y. A beautiful sunset, a great meal on a highway, a cheap but memorable souvenir, a lovely photograph, a place which the travel guides have missed and, of course, meeting different kinds of people. Travel made me grow up like nothing else did. Despite my growing taste for travel, I never got and still haven't gotten into the various aspects of planning in terms of hotels, trains and cheap flights and leave it to the other half who has a knack for these things.

Sunset in Shillong

Well, that's one thing, I absorbed from an MBA degree - areas of specialisation. Because of this, I also developed a taste for travel books and history and I began avidly reading up on places where we visited and started maintaining a blog. We stopped doing quick short visits to a place and began spending more time in each place we visited to absorb the flavour. We started getting off the touristy paths and started staying in homestays. 



A rock temple in Badami



We did trips with friends who loved to travel like us. And in a brief period of a little over two years we saw a sizeable chunk of this beautiful country. Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Kolkata, Meghalaya, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Varanasi, Allahabad, Karnataka and Delhi. And then........

Gong Xi Fa Cai in Guilin - Feb 2011

Guilin - A mini Europe in China

We arrived in Shenzen at the crack of dawn, on the first day of the Spring Festival. Our worries that we would be swamped by hordes of holidaying Chinese, thankfully, was unfounded as the lines at the immigration and at the airport were thin. After taking a short one hour flight from smoggy Shenzen, we arrived in Guilin where the air was clean, plenty of greenery and sparsely populated roads. A picturesque town, in the Guanxi province of China, the town has some very beautiful country parks and caves with some extraordinary limestone rock formations. We stayed at the Eva Inn hotel http://www.evainnguilin.com/ which is highly recommended and faces the beautiful Li River. Insist on a river facing room and you will not be disappointed. Facilities are decent and the breakfast quite filling. Behind the hotel is a cobble stoned road teeming with Chinese holidayers and lined with gaily decorated cafes teeming with red lanterns.   

Guilin is a favourite holidaying destination for the Chinese with the mandatory sprinkling of backpacking foreigners. Being a favourite destination also means the place has become a touristy and expensive evident from the steep entry fees at the country parks and traveling

costs. Still, the food is to die for.

A few rounds of the local beer, some mouthwatering dumplings and lovely beef noodles drained our exhaustion away. Being the Lunar New Year, the streets were lined with stalls selling all kinds of trinkets and some delicious food stalls. We had an Indian dosa lookalike which was quite tasty. Come evening, fireworks lit the sky with crackers bursting till the wee hours of the morning accompanied with the acrid smell of sulphur and gunpowder. Made us feel right at home during Diwali! The city is quite walking and bicycle friendly and you could spend the entire day tramping up and down some of the numerous limestone cliffs that dot the city. The country parks are quite well maintained with numerous lakes, pagodas, statues, museums, trails. The roads very wide and well kept and we were amazed at the quality of infrastructure in these places which could give some of the larger cities in India a run for its money Food to be tried: the Li River beer fish which is highly recommended and is extremely tasty. Tips: Carry enough cash as credit cards are very sparsely used, though that is changing slowly.

The voyage down Li River.

The boat ride from Guilin to Yangzhou along the Li River is one of the highlights of the trip. A road journey of around an hour takes about four hours on this meandering river stretch and is a favourite tourist attraction.  We took the morning ferry which started at 9:30 in the morning (hotel pickups start around 8am) and reached Yangzhou at around 1:30. Apart from the minor glitches such as hustling

for a window seat at the ferry, the ride down the river is memorable. Guilin was just recovering from a cold wave when we visited and the weather was cold in the mornings but the afternoons are gorgeous. Lunch is served on the boat with the

option of ordering some river fish, crabs and snail (expensive though!). There are two kinds of boats that ply on this river. One is the bamboo rafts (literally!) with some deck chairs lashed on to a bamboo raft and an outboard motor. This can be quite freezing and uncomfortable too. The other are the large

boats with enclosed cabins and these are recommended. Insist on the English version (which in plain speak would translate as the slightly more luxurious one). There is a viewing deck from the top and you could see the river bed for miles around. Tariffs are open to bargaining and we were able to knock back ours by 15-20 percent. to about 360 yuan per person. The cliffs bordering the river are big tourist attractions and all are imaginatively labeled such as nine horse hill and the man on a donkey hill. As a local saying goes “ 30 percent of what you see is through your eyes, 65 percent is through your heart and the rest 5 percent is what your travel guide tells you.” Having said that, the cruise offers some of the most gorgeous scenery. One of them has even made it to the back of the 20 yuan note!