Our friends Anuja and Bobby moved to India last year, providing like
the perfect excuse to schedule our first visit to the incredible
country. When we planned the trip, we realized with some degree of
embarrassment that we knew almost nothing about this 5,000+ year old
civilization, the world's largest and in many respects most unlikely
democracy, with more than 1 billion citizens. With two weeks of travel
there covering a fair amount of territory, we still feel as if we've
only scratched the surface but at least we made a healthy scratch.
We visited: Delhi, the capital of the nation; Rajasthan, it's most
regal state in the northwest of the country, including numerous forts
and temples, two princely cities (Jaipur and Udaipur), and a
tiger sanctuary in Ranthambhore; the high-tech South Indian metropolis of
Bangalore; the massive archaeological ruin at Hampi; and the Arabian Sea
beach paradise at Goa.
We missed lots of interesting things as well, which we'll have to
save for another trip: major cities like Bombay and Calcutta; the
Himalayan north of Darjeeling and surrounding nations Bhutan, Nepal, and
Bangladesh; the war-torn Punjabi and Kashmiri areas and Pakistan; and
South Indian beach resorts like Pondicherry, Mangalore, and the
neighboring island nation of Sri Lanka.
Click here to start in Delhi