Is this really america's best value?

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  Seattle, Washington, United States
Monday, December 8, 2008

In addition to just saying "Hey, this is where we are and what we're doing." I try to offer little tidbits of advice for others that might want to make a similar trek as the one we are currently undertaking. And the first one is a doozy!...
When I finally got all the events mapped out on a calendar (arrival, wedding, friend's 21st birthday, internal trips to places like the Taj Mahal, Golden Temple and Jaipur) I realized it was going to be impossible to see everything we wanted to see without taking some internal flights. I know, I know... India is all about trains. And we are defenitely taking some trains. But some of the places we want to go are on the other end of a 5 hour train ride, both ways, and those trains don't run every day. Some of them might only run twice a week. So I decided that flying might be an option since a 5 hour train ride is only a 45 minute flight. We totally WANT to take the trains all over India, but that's going to need to wait for a later trip. For this trip we needed to fly. So after booking all of out train trips (on http://www.irctc.co.in/ NOT http://www.indianrail.gov.in/) I set out to book out flights. I found the perfect flights on Kingfisher airlines, and their website was really nice and easy to use, but I couldn't get the tickets purchased with any of the multiple credit cards at our disposal. Only after 2 nights of struggling with this did I finally see the fine print stating that NO internal flights can be paid for with a foreign credit card. Gah! What am I going to do??

Luckily, our wonderful friend Devika, who is from Delhi, got us in touch with her mother Bindu, and she has been an absolute gem in this whole process. No only has she offered to put us up for out first couple of nights in Delhi, she had helped us every step along the way with train, pickup from the airport, and just tonight she finalized the bookings for our internal flights. She has single-handedly cut about 70% of the stress of these last couple of days.

I'm really curious who is going to read this far. I've got some friend that are only interested in seeing pretty pictures, and I have others who are the kind of people who love reading books written by crazy people who wander off into the wilderness with nothing but a pocket knife and a roll of duct tape. So I'm trying to play to both audiences a little bit. Unfortunately we don't have many interesting photos yet, as our flight doesn't leave for another 14 hours.

For those that like the crazy stories, this one is for you:
About 1:30am tonight, I was awoken from a fairly peaceful sleep by a guy yelling out in the parking lot of the hotel we are staying at. I figured it was just a drunk guy hollering at one of his friends. But was I wrong. He was nice enough to shout loud enough so that the whole countryside knew his story (even over the roar of jet engines flying overhead). Apparently, he was at the hotel to meet his "girlfriend"... meaning, they were meeting at the hotel for some kind of tryst. The problem being that she was married to another man. And this guy was making it very clear that he thought she was still in love with her husband, and he was none too happy about that. I thought for sure this was going to be a call-the-cops kinda situation. But I think the night duty front-desk guy at the hotel walked out there and got him talked down to a reasonable level, at which point he jumped in his car and stormed off. (the loud angry guy, not the front desk guy). Man, there are some colorful personalities in this neck of the woods.

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