London in a day..

We were almost at the last leg of the Europe tour. We had visited Lords, gone to South Wimbledon to meet friends, put on a sad face and made it back to Kings Cross after England lost the semi final of the world cup.

Day 12 was going to be interesting.. Would the people of London bounce back or would it be a day of mourning? We were booked on an all day tour with Evans and Evans to catch the best sights of London. It was a 7AM to 5:30 PM tour...

We were up bright and early and made it to the train station. We had to go to Victoria terminal to catch the bus tour. The kids raced ahead to do the ticket entries (we would just do the credit card sliding at the end) and they had checked out local London maps and they really enjoyed figuring out the London Underground. 

The previous post on this series is here..

We made it to the bus stop where all Evans tours left and found breakfast there. Then we were off with a bus full of folks and a very chatty tour guide. She was nice and made sure she crammed an all day tour with all the jokes in her script. It was almost like she was auditioning for a late night talk show job with us. 

We sat at the back of the bus with a Canadian mom and her two daughters who were the same age as Jr. and the Little one. This was good for us as we took family pictures for each other throughout the tour. 

The first stop was the cathedral. It was very cold and we did not want to hang out. It was also early in the morning. So we spent little time there and went to our next stop, the Palace to see the change of guard.

After so much hype for this by the tour guide, we were almost there when a Palace employee who recognized our guide gave her some information in private. She turned to us and apologized. Apparently the guards will not be there that morning as last minute security changes had been made. DJT was visiting London and it was a surprise. We were all upset and there were lot of jokes from the group. We made it to the Palace, took pictures, then walked back along a park. 

There was still one hope. There was a horse guard change that we could catch if we all walked fast enough. Walk we did and were not disappointed! 

Then it was time to board the bus again and go to the St. Pauls cathedral. We went through it but I really wanted to go to the whispering dome. During an earlier visit to London 20 years ago, I had been up to the whispering dome and it was interesting.. Still remember trying out the whisper thing with my friends who kept experimenting multiple times till the whisper came back with the exact message sent out. (note to self, should find out what Weeshie is up to these days!)

We were however told that there was a narrow staircase and we had only 20 minutes to go back so there would be no climbing up. I tried to tell the lady that the same thing had happened at the Eiffel tower and we did make it up and down by running, but she would not let us go. She said there was no time. We all had to go down to the crypts! So off we went to the floor below the church to see all the famous people in their resting place and the history behind it. The kids enjoyed that part of the tour.

This was followed by a quick lunch outside where there were long lines in every restaurant thanks to the local business folks standing in line. We were all to gather outside in a courtyard after finding lunch. The courtyard had a big screen TV playing tennis matches and there were seats for people to just come sit and enjoy during lunch. The whole place had a relaxed atmosphere and the coulds made sure some of the heat was not felt. 

We enjoyed waiting there for 20 minutes for everyone to gather and went to our next stop. The Tower of London. On the way we were passing Trafalgar square, Picadilly circus, etc. etc. and got a lot of interesting tidbits from our guide. 

The tower of London was interesting and hindsight being 20/20 we should have just gone and seen it on our own. A lot of folks in our group split as soon as we entered the tower. ONly later we found out why. It was the last official stop and after that we got tickets for a Thames river cruise that would take us to where we wanted. We walked with the group and found that the tour was dragging.

Then we also took our cruise tickets, stood in line to go see the "crown jewels" which were mostly taken from India, all the while shaking our heads in disbelief on how the winner always gets to rewrite history.  There was no photographs allowed in the crown jewels museum. The security guards actually went after folks who took pictures and made them delete it off their phones. That automatically challenged a bunch of tourists in front of us to go take cell phone pics when no one was watching.. we found the whole thing to be very amusing..we went up to one more tower where two kids were said to have been killed in the succession wars and walked towards the cruise stop.

Here are some slide shows from the day..

The weather was perfect, contrary to what we keep hearing about "London weather being drab" and we thoroughly enjoyed the ride along the Thames.

Got some nice pano shots from the slow moving boat..

When we finally got off, we had to go to the closest underground station to meet San's college classmate for dinner. He lived 40 mintues from London but worked in the Charing Cross area. It was going to be one more exercise to find the right station and get there.

We ended up in the wrong station! We took another train and finally found him. It was another busy area with a lot of restaurants close to the Opera house. It also started raining heavily by the time we reached there, but it was pleasant. Picked a mexican place to eat dinner. The food was very yummy and we said our byes and walked back for one last subway ride for the day. 

It was a very good day as all day tours went. Would definitely recommend Evans and Evans for this tour. To quote my grandma "alangaama kulungaama kootindu ponan" .. it was a no stress tour with the right pace and right breaks.

A video of Day 12 is here..

Day 12 was great. We walked a lot but some how were not tired. We were smiling throughout the day, enjoying the sights, having a good day. I learned that it takes the family almost a dozen days to hit true vacation mode and to let go of little things and be okay.

The last day of the tour was Day 13 and was to be THE highlight of the London leg.. Hogwarts!

When money is no object

We spent Day 8 of the Europe trip visiting the palace of Versailles. The previous post on this series is here..

It was a half day package tour with the driver of a minivan picking us up right outside our Air B&B and driving to Versailles. But the tour did not start till 10:30 in the monring. So we had to eat a heavy breakfast and go. We were to leave Versailles at 5PM and it would be close to 6:30 PM before we would make it back. 

Boo had mentioned that Saravana Bhavan was close to the train station. We checked on google maps and found that it was a 12 minute walk from our place. So off we went and were not disappointed. 

The Saravana Bhavan in Paris is really good. Way better than any of the other ones we have eaten at. By the time we walked back to our hotel, it was time to start. The van for our tour was ready. It was just the four of us and another family of 3 from Riverside. An guy who was much older than me who had a kid same age as Jr. Apparently he had money in Semiconductor hardware and had retired. He was giving me advice on how to follow in his footsteps and I was hoping for some nugget of wisdom and eventually realized that lady luck has to be on your side. 

Anyways, lets get back to Versailles. We went past the Louis Vutton building, Neiully s/ Siene (which appears repeatedly in the Jason Bourne movies) and went along the river and after an hour or more were at Versailles. The approach to the Palace said it all. It was a very hot day in that area and based on the crowds it was going to be a crazy day! and it was...

The driver told us that he will introduce us to our guide and be gone. He would leave exactly at 5 from the same place. We asked him if we would recommend any place to eat and he told us about this crepe place outside the palace. We made a mental note and went with a larger group of 34 people..

The palace is the worst when it comes to front entrace security and crowd control. There were at least a dozen tourguides with their groups all fighting to get in. They had time slots to enter and apparently the entire thing was off by one hour because of delays. Someone fainted because of dehydration in the heat. A Chinese tourguide picked a fight with the security and our tourguide was advising us to stay calm or we would never get in..There was no respite from the sun and we were out there for an hour almost. Finally we got in. 

The entrance to this place is grand as were all the art works and the corridors. Looks like the young king had all the money to dispose of and spared no effort to make this a grand palace. We saw a repeat of a lot of statutes we had already seen at the various museums in Italy and turns out he tired to import the same artists to build him the palace and was not so successful because of his temper tantrums. Our tour guide was annoying and our headsets had so much static that it made our head hurt. So we pretty much started wandering around with the group and just observing. We could get the history later..

We finished through the castle and went into a grand courtyard. This was beautiful as was the garden. 

This garden is huge with some amazing fountains and sculptures. We walked to the garden when we realized there was no water and there were no water fountains inside the Palace. There was water to be bought and ice cream to be had on the other side of the garden if we walked a mile. We walked as fast as we could and had some amazing ice cream and got water bottles. Now that we were ready to walk again, we wandered around the gardens with smiles on our faces.

They should have drinking water in a place like this. Even if they are trying to make money for water, they could at least make it available! we saw so many older people and kids suffering. It was a mixed bag, this Palace trip. A few umbrellas, some occasional shade and some water would have made all the difference. Here are three slide shows of photos from the Palace and gardens. 

After we made it out of the palace, we hit the crepe place. The road outside was much cooler thanks to all the trees that lined the road.

We took pictures while the crepes were being made..

and then had some crepes!

Then we headed back to Paris.

The kids wanted to eat something in the room. So San and me went back to Saravana Bhavan, had our fill and got some stuff for the kids to eat. 

It was an early to bed day because the next day was a tour from 7 to 7 with a hectic schedule.

Paris by night was interesting. We learned that the apartment building we were in was built in 1869! There was a lot of noise within and outside the building.

Good thing we were exhausted and were able to sleep right away!

The palace had great panoramic views.. 

and a video that captures our day in Versailles!

on to Day 9...

Sightseeing Marathon - The forts of Jaipur

The last post on Jaipur trip is linked here...

Day 3 of our trip was entirely spent close to Jaipur City. We saw so many sights and I took so many photographs for one day that this day's events have to be broken into two parts. 

We started early in the morning and went to see the Jal Mahal (Water palace). It was nice, given we were not allowed to go to it on the boat. We took a few "profile pictures" and moved on to go up the mountain range to see the first of three forts around Jaipur. 

Camels greeted us in the roadsides

The place had hundreds of dressed up camels that were used by the locals as transportation, be it pulling carts or as vehicles themselves. Cows: Banaras :: Camels : Jaipur, when it comes to animals mingling with traffic on roads.

The Jal Mahal was not picture perfect in the morning given the bland background and backlighting. So we planned to get back to it on another day or hope for better shots in the evening.

The views of the city were great as we moved up towards Jaigarh fort.

The fort had an impressive water tank that made it secure with respect to its water needs.  The entire thing had walls with slotted windows where marksmen would line up to shoot intruders, or so we were told by our guide.

The fort also is home to the worlds largest cannon!

Four elephants were requried to manouver the cannon and given that only one test shot was fired and that was enough to scare everyone away, this might have been a precursor to atomic bomb testing when it came to the logic of "lets just show everyone how scary this is and no one will dare attack us".. a logic that goes bad pretty quickly as someone else comes up with a different weapon in a few hundred years!

The walls of this fort run through the perimeter of the hills. Very impressive given it was built almost 400 years ago for a place that did not have any threats at the time it was built.

We wandered around the fort walls and turrets and got to see the valley views.

Right now the fort is home to a few tens of thousands of pidgeons! They were everywhere.

The views from the walls was just amazing!

After seeing this fort we went to see another fort, the Nahargarh fort. Nahar apparently means Tiger, but that had nothing to do with the naming as there was some backstory to this fort. It was pitched to us as a fort which was to keep the queens secure in times of war. 

This one had really impressive views of the entire Jaipur City as well as the valley below. The queens had it made, as long as their king was alive. If he died, they were either burnt alive with his body or had to go queen with the new king. Not so great, as far as options went. It was not like they could get a pension and live their life. 

The entrance was impressive once we got to the top of the mountain. 

The bikes provided a much needed time warp for this picture!

You walk into a courtyard and there are rooms for the queens on either side. There were way too many queens for one king and the kids were like "What the hell? I want to see who this idiot was who thought he could manage that many women!" 

We got to walk through three floors of the palace all the way to the rooftop to get a view of the City! Guess that if you are a king and you can do whatever you want with taxpayer $ or Rupees or whatever the hell currency he had, you get to build things like this! 

Every square inch of the surface was a work of art! This forting business must have been good for the local economy, employment etc. Maybe that was one reason for building these things, much like how we build unncessary Tanks and Military equipment that no one is asking for in places where there are no other jobs.

After catching a view of Jaipur city from every side, we started driving down to the Amer (Amber) Palace or Fort. They mixed it up w.r.t. calling it Amer or Amber and Fort or Palace. Guess it was both.  By the time we reached level ground, we were hungry. Our tour guide suggested we eat first and then see the Amer palace, but we wanted to finish off everything one shot. 

What we saw at the Amer fort was nothing short of spectacular. That will be part 2 of this post..

I really wanted to finish the Jaipur travelog before August and the Golu season, but there are still a few hundred photos to edit. The international travel disrupts posting. Will have to figure out a way to get VPN going so I can edit posts from hotel rooms in Asia. 

Another day, another post. On the plus side, it is good to be back in the US with the wife and kids again!

Luck, Chance or divine intervention - A trip to Jaipur

My vacation in India was supposed to be two weeks, including the 4th of July holiday. San and the kids were to spend another 2 weeks while I was to experiment alone in the Kitchen and go back to Asia for a business trip in those two weeks. My stay in India extended by an extra four days, and I got a chance to spend those four days with the family on a Jaipur trip. The way it happened was scary though.

My FIL had dropped me off at Mumbai airport for a Cathay Flight to Hongkong. Being my first time at the new airport, was happy snapping pictures of the airport and was in general looking forward to a great trip. It was a full flight and just as we were cleared for take off and the plane was about to go around the bend to start take off, the plane made the usual funny noises. The pilot however, announced that he was aborting take off and instead was going to cross over to the other side of the airport and get it checked by Engineering. His exact words were "this is most likely to be a 10 or 30 minute delay".

There we were on the outskirts of the airport with twenty or so vehicles of different sizes flashing cop lights everywhere. We did not know if it was really an engineering problem or something else. One hour goes by, we are all asked to remain seated, not get up, no water, no tray table lowering and no updates. Slowly the passengers who woke up and realized they are still on the plane started demanding updates. The updates were few and far between and finally 4 hours and 45 minutes after sitting on a plane that was supposed to fly for 5 hours 30 minutes,  the passengers started a mutiny of sorts. 

It was my most ridiculous experience on a plane to date. Finally the pilot said "we are aborting this flight" but we cannot go back to the airport in the plane. You will be taken in buses 50 at a time. The only good thing was that the passengers in first class allowed the elders and people with kids to go out first. 

Once we got back to the airport, it became even more ridiculous. The ground staff, which was mostly new college grads in Cathay uniforms were clearly not ready to handle 400+ irate and tired passengers at 6AM and to top things off we had to get a "cancel" stamp on our passports to Re-enter India! Then we had to get our baggage back and go through "customs". Fortunately they created a separate line for this aborted flight and let us out fast. Now this little "cancel" stamp is making every immigration officer look me up and down (I have already made it back to Asia twice since July)!

When my FIL picked me up back at the airport at 7AM, the logistics of this hit me. They were leaving at 11 AM to Jaipur. I had to stay alone in Mumbai for 2 days, then fly back and forth across the Pacific within 3 days. So alternate arrangements were made in 2 hours. I got Wifi ready to work from Jaipur over the next 4 nights and got a last minute ticket to fly with them and fly out of India 4 hours after we land back in Mumbai. It was sight seeing by day and work by night and was brutal, but we were all happy. The photographer was now part of the trip!

I was also over joyed at seeing San and the kids and have never hugged them tighter. Turns out the plane had engine failure and it was a good thing the pilot aborted the flight! 

Off we went to Jaipur and boy was it great! My FIL always does an outstanding job of planning a trip months in advance. He had to adjust on the fly and cancel a trip to Bikaner given my work schedule, but we managed to cover things in Jaipur at a steady pace over 4 days.

The ITC Rajputana, where we stayed was amazing. Just look at the lobby! Had to do HDR images to just capture a fraction of what our eyes saw there. 

The kids were running up and down the marble stair cases. To date we have not been in a more beautiful hotel.

Then we went to the room. It had a great view of the pool and there were folks going through a Yoga class in the lawn. 

Even the hallway props in this hotel were awesome!

After relaxing for an hour, we visited the City palace of Jaipur. As soon as we entered the palace, we were greeted by a snake charmer. These guys know how to play to the stereotype!

There was a puppet show which included "Michael Jackson" which amused Jr. and the little one. I will reiterate.. they know how to play to stereotypes..

The Palace was full of weaponry from the 1700's and the gifts that the kings had received from various places over the years. 

 The halls were magnificent. I just went click crazy.. 

We used a tour guide who gave us a decent explanation for every thing we saw. This palace has multiple levels above and below the ground level. An engineering marvel if you realize they had a 10+ story building 350+ years ago.

My mind kept going to the same thought. These guys created so many wonderful things hundreds of years ago. What have we done since then other than figure out how to destroy them or disrespect them? and I did not think of this in an Indian context but a global context. Eisenhower created a fantastic highway system in the fifties and today there is not enough money to even maintain those, let alone reinvent. 

When it comes to creating architecture, we suck compared to our previous generations. It is all glass, concrete and steel. The artistry seems to have taken a backseat and chances are all these glass thingys wont last 350 years. 

This palace had 4 gates which were so ornate, one for each season. Apparently the king used to use the entrance for that season. 

Waited patiently at this gate for the two guys to leave, but no luck. They insisted on being part of the shot. 

 The stone work in the palace was mind boggling. 

as were the doors with all the metal work. This is one huge door to enter the palace!

Just look at this one pillar. I asked the guide how long it took to complete the palace and he said "one kings starts it and his grandson finishes it".. most palaces in the area were completed over almost a hundred years.

There were a few intersting artifacts in the Palace that caught our attention. One was this mirror gifted to the King from the Chinese. No matter where you stood, you could get a full length reflection. 

and what was the worlds largest silver pot! This thing made it to UK and back because the King would only drink and bathe in water from the Ganges. So he made two large silver pots, filled them with Ganga water and hauled it in a ship for his UK tour. 

The palace also had a big hall where all the artists who were patronized by the king for generations demonstrated their art form. The kids thoroughly enjoyed spending an hour watching the artist paint minute details with vegetable colors on silk. 

After spending a good two hours at the palace, we were off to have a traditional Rajasthani dinner.

Would definitely recommend the ITC Rajputana hotel for a stay if you can manage one of those dicount deals.

That is a post for another day...