India Here We Come!

On Tuesday, November 13, 2008 we will be making our long-awaited trip to India. It's a dream come true, although every now and again, like almost constantly, we think maybe it will be a nightmare. No, it won't! India is a place where all the rules may be thrown out the window. We are expecting everything to be hard to do, everything to be confusing, distracting, awe-inspiring, exhausting, wearing, exhilarating, just the perfect Nigel and Geordie trip.

We remind ourselves that we will not be the first to do this. We have been proceeded by thousands, nay, millions before us. Hey, didn't Marco Polo stop off here on his way to China? Oh, probably. There won't be a single new discovery we will make for the world. (As if!)

So this is how it will go... We will leave on Tuesday evening, our bags packed, the little plastic bag with our liquids as deemed appropriate by British Airways, maybe my knitting with the needles already holding the start of a sock to show I'm legitimate, and our passports holding our Visa to India. Now how exciting is that. We spent a morning one day and an afternoon the next sitting in the office of the Consul General of India to first deliver our application and then to pick it up - it was so exciting to hear the man at the counter as he passed us back our passports, visas safely glued in, say, Have a nice vacation. Thank you, we will.

We fly to London first, then after a short stay of four hours or so, we will be off to Delhi on our second overnight flight. We get in at some ungodly hour, but we will be met at the airport by someone from the hotel we have booked, and we will feel safe and sound as we are taken through the presumed maelstrom of traffic to our place of refuge.

We begin with a tour using Imaginative Traveller. Our tour is called Desert, Forts and Palaces.

A tour you say, Nigel and Geordie are doing a tour! What is happening in the world? Well, maybe we're getting smart in our old age. We have decided that to save our sanity, we will let someone else worry about us for the first three weeks and once we are weaned we can strike out on our own. Geordie has been very busy, doing the striking out. After a few false starts he finally managed to book us train reservations on India Railways (they move over a million people a day, so I imagine they can get us to Varanasi), and hotels in Varanasi, Bodhgaya (where the Buddha gained enlightenment and taught his first disciples, and on to Kolkata (you may know it as Calcutta, ma'am).

And he's even booked us a flight from Kolkata to Chennai (the city formerly known as Madras - anyone for some cheap cloth?) So we are well and truly on our way.

It's exciting for us. We are fretting over what to pack, other than that bag of liquids, do we need a warm coverup on the camel tour into the Thar Desert at night? Can we haggle for some cheap sweater we don't mind throwing away when we reach the beaches of the east coast? Oh dear oh, my, Lions and tigers and bears oh my!

There is so much we are expecting from this trip. We will come back enlightened, if not about life then with our weight. We are calling this our spa vacation, we expect to lose weight when we experience our bouts of Delhi Belly, and we will come back waif like and probably ravenous, after attempting to feed ourselves using only our right hand, our left tied behind us to prevent us from making the worst faux pas imaginable in India, eating with the wrong hand.

Can you tell I'm excited? Of course you can. What gave it away?

We think that this is going to be the way we communicate with you and the rest of the world from now on - Blog on! We'll keep you posted as we post our newsy notes and your mailbox will be clogged with nothing but gentle reminders that we have said something new and earthshattering and you must quickly check us out to see the latest news of Nigel and Geordie on Their Trip to India.