India Tour 2018

Here are a few untold stories from my recent India Tour, stories that for one reason or another just didn’t fit into posts I published each day. Head injury The first and most important untold story is about how Bev Morris, one of the women in my tour group, slipped and fell and cracked open her head when she got up...

We had the most relaxing time walking the warm and beautiful hillsides of tea plants in and around Munnar.  Being high up the Western Ghats, the air was sweet and clean and scented by jasmine and brugmansia. At night, the landscape was even more delightful as the hillsides gently dissolved into mist and the setting sun turned the sky warm...

We left Udaipur and flew back to Delhi for one night before catching an early morning flight to Kochi in southern India. The moment we arrived, we were aware of the change in temperature and humidity, even though it has been hot - in the 30s - in Udaipur. But in Kochi, it was also humid and tropical and we quickly...

We came to India for many reasons. Most of us wanted to get a more intimate, personal, first-hand experience of the country rather than relying on what we had read or been told by others. However, many of us came with some negative expectations. We had accepted that we were likely to find streets crowded, after all we were well...

Our flight from Vancouver to Delhi could not have gone more smoothly. It was long - 14 hours, Delhi being 13 1/2 hours ahead of us on the West Coast - but there is no better way to travel on a long distance flight than aboard an Air Canada 787 Dreamliner.  We decided to come to India two days early,...

Apparently, the word “pur” on the end of any Indian town or city name means place. So, Bharatpur, I assume means, the place of Bharat and Jaipur, means the place of Jai. From Bharatpur, we headed to Jaipur, the pink city, stopping on the way to see a village public school where the kids were sitting on the floor in small...

Chandigarh, which is also known as the “beautiful city”,  was one of the first planned cities after India got its independence from Britain in 1947. The city’s planners opted for a grid system with each area called a section rather than having a neighbourhood or district name. Our hotel here, for instance, is in Section 17, close to a lot of...