Honeymoon recap: Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India: Varanasi, India: Rajasthan, Part 1 and now India: Rajasthan, Part 2.
Back in October and November of ‘06, when I was hastily planning our honeymoon, I knew I wanted to go to India, Varanasi was on the list. Somewhere along the line, I ran into a blog, written by a couple who travel extensively and live in Congo, Africa, Jeremie + Rita. They had documented a tour they took through India’s most western state, Rajasthan. Their photos were amazing. They had rented a car and driver and spent 10 days driving from city to city. I knew that we would be traveling pretty hard for over 2 months through Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and India. For our last two weeks, I wanted to do something that would be less hectic. Something that didn’t require us to carry large backpacks around or worry about hotels. Hiring a car and driver to drive us around Rajasthan looked like a really good way to end the momentous trip. There was something very enticing about the idea of having a driver to guide us through the last 2 weeks.
In retrospect, if I wanted something chill and mellow, I should have planned two weeks at the beach.
During my planning stage, I found a car and driver service in Delhi (at the advice of Jeremie + Rita) and planned a rough outline for a 12 day trip (using theirs for inspiration). The car service would be responsible for booking all hotels (and we agreed on an approximate per night price) as well as gas, tolls, parking and all car related stuff and per diem for the driver. We agreed on an approximate price for the package and kept in contact over email, while we traveled through southeast asia. After our stay in Varanasi, we flew back to Delhi. Our driver, Kimsingh, picked us up from the Delhi airport and we met up with the tour company to solidify everything. We stayed the night in Delhi and early the next morning we were off in a flash.
You are welcome to customize your itinerary, but these car services (and there are several) have established routes depending on the amount of days you’d like to travel. I chose a rather ambitious, customized route for the 10 days we’d be on the road (12 total with Delhi on the bookends), but there was just so much that I wanted to see. Our itinerary had us going from Delhi to Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Udaipur, Ranakpur, Jodhpur, Khurie, Jaisalmer, Mandawa and back to Delhi. I had no idea how much ground we’d be covering, it’s not necessarily the miles that make it hard, some days we drove for 6 hours and only managed to cover 250 km.
Overall, the car and driver thing was a great way to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. There was no way we could have done so much, traveling by train. But traveling by car was unnerving sometimes, as the roads in Rajasthan are insane and the driving, worse. Also, I didn’t realize it until the first night, but traveling with a third person (the driver) was something that took almost the entire trip to get used to. The language barrier was hard as well and once again India has it’s own rhythm, which took a lot of getting used to. The hotels that the tour service booked for us were actually pretty nice, we were pleasantly surprised. Food was a harder thing to handle, as most stops were at restaurants that were all owned by the same group. The food priced exorbitantly (average $5-10/person), keep in mind we’d been traveling for 2 months, we knew what things costed. But in the end, even that was a small price to pay for a clean toilet and sink afterwards(!). The car and driver thing is definitely an experience and one that takes some getting used to. But in the end, it was an experience neither of us will forget.
This is part 2, it covers Khurie, Jaisalmer and the long long trip back to Mandawa and then on to Delhi.
slideshow | photoset | all Honeymoon sets
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I’d like to give a special thank you to Jeremie + Rita for inspiring this part of our honeymoon and giving me much needed advice on the itinerary and the car service. Thanks guys!
