Tamil Nadu has seen some severe flooding in recent years during monsoon season. The floods in October-November 2015 were particularly devastating. Some of the factors that contributed to floods in prior years have been mitigated, but severe rains can still grind Chennai to a halt. Before even deciding WHERE we wanted to have our wedding, […]
Getting a visa validated in New Delhi at the end of January, you already knew that a storm was brewing. Customs officers were wearing masks and gloves. There were bold warnings everywhere about recent travel to China and a few other locations. At the time, there were no (official) cases of Covid-19 in India. It […]
*Full picture gallery below* “Delhi Belly,” the “Montezuma’s Revenge” of India, is greatly feared by travelers. In the best case scenario, it can ruin your trip. In the worst case, you’re going to the hospital. Maybe you don’t even leave the hospital. This is definitely something to be feared as a traveler in India and […]
Along with a few other sites, today we planned on checking off our last of the three UNESCO “World Heritage” sites in New Delhi: Red Fort. I gotta be honest with this one, it looks like a construction zone and is really in no way picturesque inside. This place was touched in many areas by […]
Now that our time in India is coming to a close, I think we’re just beginning to really work effectively as a team when dealing with the large variety of predators that are encountered on the streets here. Shopkeepers are easy, just keep walking… or if inside and not going well… leave. Beggars…. ignore them, […]
On the way to our “First Class Sleeper” train car, we walked past dozens and dozens and dozens of open-air hard seating general cars. They had bars on the windows with very sad faces peering out, with people packed in tightly on hard benches. Thousands of people. It looked like the train to some forced […]
After reading a lot of India travel blogs, one thing becomes clear: Agra is not a place many people are fond of after actually visiting there. It’s often the place where travelers end up getting really ill during a visit to India. It’s filthy, smelly, has packs of wild dogs roaming the streets, and aggressive […]
After a restful night in our fully air conditioned “oasis in the desert,” we started another day of sightseeing with our trusty tuk-tuk driver Vijay. We had asked him to be there at 8:45 a.m. to make sure we started as early as possible–and it turns out he was more punctual than we were! We […]
As we planned out this trip, we received plenty of advice…. some solicited, some not so much. Some advice has proven priceless…. and some has proven worthless. And now, as the India segment of our trip has gotten underway, I recall the words of an Indian surgeon I worked with in Cambridge: “Nothing can prepare […]