We understand that only a portion of eastern India is technically included in what is generally considered “Southeast Asia” (aka Indochina). While we didn’t visit those particular parts of India, we don’t have a website for “South Asia” Travel and wanted to include reports from our trip there so here it is.

We’ve thought about traveling to India for years. We’ve been enchanted by the history, color, spirituality, food and the culture of India from afar. We have met many very impressive people of Indian descent living in the U.S. and while traveling to other parts of the world. We had gotten so far in our previous plans as choosing where we would visit, considering the time of year for travel and researching hotels, excursions and restaurants but never pulled the trigger until our trip there in November 2018.

So what had stopped us? I feel a little guilty admitting this but to be perfectly honest, we had heard stories about the preponderance of abject poverty and worried about getting beat over the head with that image everywhere we might visit. And there was the Delhi Belly thing. We had read and were told that no matter how careful you were, when you visit India you should plan on a few down days due to gastrointestinal disturbances.

But early in 2018 we put our concerns aside, mustered up our courage and started planning a trip to India in earnest.

While we typically enjoy independent travel; we reasoned that on our first trip to India, it would be wise to enlist the help of a good travel agent/tour company(s).

It seems an unwritten law that travelers from the U.S. visiting India are obligated to include a tour of the “Golden Triangle”;  the three cities of Delhi, Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and Jaipur. All joking aside, it really would have been a shame to travel all that far and not see the Taj Mahal so we enlisted the well respected firm of Cox & Kings to help us plan that part of our visit. We initially made contact with their London office but were directed to the Los Angeles branch and they proved to be most helpful.

Anyone who has spent any time at all on this web page knows that we have a special interest in textiles and with the rich tradition in India of multiple disciplines of textiles from rug weaving to cloth weaving to block printing to embroidery to multiple dyeing techniques; we decided to dovetail our Golden Triangle Tour with a Tamil Nadu Textile Breakaway tour organized by the Delhi company Engaging Journeys Private Limited under their Breakaway Tour brand.

Both tours were organized along similar lines. Both were private tours of just the two of us. Except when connecting between the two tours we traveled from city to city by car keeping the same car and driver for the length of each week long tour and meeting up with a local guide in each city that we visited. There also was a main facilitator for each tour and in the case of Cox & Kings, a local facilitator (in addition to the local guide) in each city.

We were very pleased with both tours and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend others use the same services.

We arrived at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport at roughly 10:00 PM local time after about a 5-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia via a Malaysian Airlines Airbus A330.

The first impression that hit us as we emerged from the terminal was the heavy air pollution so we were a bit surprised when our greeter from Cox & Kings told us that thanks to a couple days of rain, the air quality was quite improved over what it had been recently.

We’ll go into more detail about our visits to each city but here are some very broad probably uninformed general impressions about India

• • • The worst air pollution we saw was in Delhi. It was still bad in Agra but not as bad as Delhi. A little better in Jaipur. It got even better when we traveled south to Tamil Nadu. The further south we got the better the air quality. By the end of that 2nd week, we could see stars at night for the first time in the nights spent near Madurai.
    • Indian sweets are REALLY SWEET!
    • The food in India varies from region to region but overall; the food everywhere was GREAT! The best Indian food we get here at home bears a reasonable resemblance to what we ate in India but the best we’ve eaten here in the U.S. would be considered no better than an average meal there. The biggest difference between what we ate there and what we see here was the abundance and huge variety of really good vegetarian dishes. There are lots and lots of options on different freshly made breads.
  • India is a very colorful place and each city seemed to have its own favorite color. Bright yellows and oranges in one city. Deep blues in another. Pink in another.

• Traffic in India is completely chaotic. Don’t even think about driving there. In our travel, we were able to recognize a few unofficial rules of the road:
  1. Driving in one lane at a time and not driving for long distances in the lane of on-coming traffic are really more suggestions than any sort of enforced law.
  2. No matter your position in traffic, what direction you or nearby traffic is heading or if you are making a turn or going straight; the vehicle with loudest horn has the right of way.
  3.  The number of seats on any vehicle of conveyance (car, truck, bus or train) bears no reflection of the number of passengers it might be carrying at any particular time.
• Drivers are encouraged to use their horn often and long.  In fact, many (if not most) trucks and buses have either “Please Sound Your Horn” or “Horn OK Please” painted on the rear of the vehicle asking approaching drivers to blow their horn to alert the truck (or bus) driver of their position.
• We did witness some displays of poverty while traveling in India, but it was not the ever present overwhelming element that we had feared. It was not the pre-emanate impression of our visit there.
• Neither of us had any gastrointestinal issues the entire 2-weeks we were in India or the 3-weeks prior spent in Lao, Thailand and Malaysia.
• The people we met in India were extremely kind and helpful and very proud of their country.  A very high percentage of the people there speak English.