Gate1 Travel – 12 Day golden Triangle of India with Varanasi February 26 to March 11, 2024 Home pick-up by van transport to Orlando, 2 flights, to Dubai and New Delhi; Two flights home from New Delhi to Dubai; a day layover due to missed flight, and then to Orlando and transport van home With Tom Eng — and a group of 34; and final 13 persons to Varanasi Tour Guide Sameer Banerjee, A Hindu and guide for 28 years, grew up in Varanasi, his mother and mother-in-law still live there and Sameer and his wife, daughter and son live in Delhi
I couldn’t believe the number of wheelchairs needed for the people getting on a flight in Orlando to Dubai. The local airport staff told me “those people” usually all get wheelchairs so they can get on the plane first.
It happened coming home from Dubai also.
I forked out an extra $350 for Business Class for the 3 hour flight Dubai to Delhi. (I shouldn’t sit in my be late at night on my phone impulsively spending money!) It works out to $100/hour!! Crazy! But I wanted to see what Emirates Business Class was like. It’s not as nice as Qatar. Emirates lets the people in economy march through our section to watch us drink champagne, listen to music in our headphones and lean back in our roomy chairs.
But just because you wheedled your way into a Business Class Emirates is quick to tell you you don’t rate enough to use their lounges! The bastards!
Business Class windows get fake wood trim around them. The small window is my artsy photo of the City of Dubai.
While drinking champagne, Dolly’s new Rock Star ‘album’ was playing in my Noise Cancelling headphones.
IT’S FANTASTIC!! She wrote a great rock song and she’s got 29 songs with duets with many rock stars, each one better than the next!!
Since she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, she felt she had better have a rock album.
You GO, Dolly!
Tom had to fill out his form before getting out of the Indian airport. The flight attendant gave me the form on the plane, which was required by anyone without an India Passport. I guess the flight attendant wasn’t sure if Tom looked like he would own an Indian Passport or not.
He looks fresh and happy since he’s Business Class all the way!
If you thought this was our tour bus and this was our hotel in India, you’d be biggly mistaken. We had a lovely big bus with WIFI and USB ports (and a bathroom for the first half of the trip.) And we had all 5 Star hotels, except one, which was a 4 Star.
It was so nice to come home to a clean, soft and fluffy bed, with a coffee pot and complimentary bottled water.
It wasn’t safe to drink the tap water nor use it to brush your teeth. That’s where free bottled water was so convenient.
This hotel was beautiful. We saw the beautiful table-sized bouquet the night we arrived and the next day it was replaced by many more fresh flowers.
You can see the haze over the city, which is bad AQI (Air Quality Index). It never hit the real terrible level (200 to 300), but it was unhealthy for sensitive people. It was always over 100, as opposed to Daytona Beach’s 23 score.
Here’s another artsy photo.
Tom and I ate a the China Empress and I ordered tomato, pineapple fried rice and asked for no spice. My first bite made my mouth on fire.
The reason was “the chef just added red chili pepper as a force of habit.” AAUUGGHH! I couldn’t eat it. They made another batch and it was delish!
Here is our nice bus. We had 34 people on the tour and Tour Guide, Sameer, repeated each persons name. He started with one couple and moved to a second. Then he went back to the first, said their names and then said the second couple’s names. He went to a third traveler, said her name and went back and said the first and the second persons’ names. He did that for all 34 people, and by the end he had memorized all our names. Amazing.
Welcome to India. A lot of cars and a lot of honking. It appears that you honk when you are coming through so there’s a lot of long and loud honks. And the roads are chaos. Notice that there are no lane lines, they just merge and swerve.
But what do you expect from a little country with 1.4 BILLION people in it!
I believe I heard that only electric and natural gas cars are allowed on the roads. Maybe that’s only in the cities.
Our first stop was to a mosque for which we had to take off our shoes in deference to their religious beliefs. We left on our sox and walked all around outside. Putting back on our shoes with the dirt we acquired on our sox was a yucky situation.
The man who wore shorts had to put on this skirt, also in deference to their religious beliefs – no bare skin showing.
There’s Tom sitting in the blue shirt. He usually brings a stool, but certain temples and mosques didn’t let him bring it in.
He makes that mosque look huge!
There was a lot of sandstone and marble.
I was in a classy outfit myself, for modesty. And I started out well using a mask to stave off the awful air quality, but days later, I wasn’t using one unless I could smell the pollution in the air.
The worse than poor quality toilet was WWAAYY down these steps. Once down, I didn’t know it when I climbed all the steps upward, we were just going back down to the bus. I got my 10,000 steps in each day, for sure.
This is a good time to discuss toilets. It should make us all so grateful for what we have in the U.S.
The toilets usually did not have toilet paper (or one woman with one roll would tear off a few sheets and hand it to you). Most were American toilets; but a few were holes in the floor where you had to squat. Those were mostly smelly and wet. The toilet paper was to be deposited into the waste can next to the toilet, since the TP would not flush down the toilets. Sometimes there was no waste can — and then what do you do with wet toilet paper? There was usually cold water for washing hands and possibly a dirty pump bottle containing some sort of soap; but rarely hand towels. Sometimes I thought you got MORE germs from the soap bottle!
A comparison: Here’s the ziplock bag I carried in my purse at all times to avoid drip drying, pilfered and rolled from a hotel bathroom. Compare it to the pretty quilted, swirly, toilet paper at my home with the beautiful scalloped edges. Yes! You can buy it that way now. It’s called Smooth Tear.
After taking off The Little House on the Prairie outfit, we took a bicycle rickshaw ride.
Note how tightly my fingers are gripping my knees. It was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Hit the PLAY arrow and listen to the honking, look at the tiny amount of space they allow for passing, and the different vehicles and carts coming down the road.
Hit the PLAY button and notice our poor rickshaw man trying to pedal us around.
Note the dirty shops that are open.
Note how tiny the alley is.
This was our rickshaw driver. He had to get off and push once in awhile.
Look at the space between vehicles!!
Scenes of the city of Delhi. And of course, a McDonalds is always somewhere. They don’t eat cows in India (they are sacred) so their burger is a kind of fried mashed potatoes. But they still have fried chicken and their world-famous fries.
You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when you see a MONKEY overhead!
I’m up at 3:39 after 5 hours sleep with jet lag. I HATE this part of the trip!
I’ve got laryngitis — don’t know if it was the poor air quality, something I picked up in the airport, bad immune system due to lack of sleep, or what.
Needless to say, I’m feeling my age these days.
PLENTY more India to come but I’ve got out of town friends arriving soon.
Safe Travels!
Linda Jeanne