postcard request post!

I love getting postcards from all over the place, and I know I'm not the only one. I also love having an excuse to buy postcards -- there are only so many I can get for myself before the inevitable question of "where am I gonna put them?" comes up. So, if anyone wants a postcard from Thailand or India, let me know! An email would be best, since I need your address and you really don't want to post your address at random on the internet. Also, if you have a preference for country of postcard, also let me know.

My email is dancingyel AT gmail DOT com, obviously formatted correctly. It will help if you put "postcard" or something like that in the subject line. Also, do send me your address, even if you're sure I already have it. It'll help me keep organized!

Travel necessities, courtesy of Walmart.

Travel Geekiness

I wanted to find out how optimal our travel plan was.

First I calculated what an ideal trip would look like. (time we left Hong Kong-time we arrived in Bangkok(in days))*number of useful tourist hours in a day (13)=396.86 hours.

Next I added up all of the time in each city-time needed for sleeping and eating (11 hours per day)-3 hour per city for orientation and waiting for trains. =335.20 hours.

Example, we will spend 63.25 hours in Varanasi of which we will be there 2 nights leaving 38.25 hours of effective tourist time.

By dividing the two numbers we have a tourist efficiency ratio of 84%.

Note: this doesn't take into account the actual number of daylight hours which may significantly reduce our efficiency.

Other stats:

we will be away for 798 hours.

Be in Cities for 612 hours.

Be in transit for 186 hours.

If I can, I'll record our actual movements and see how they compare to the expected ones. Given that travel can be a lot more random than a spreadsheet would indicate, they may be significantly off.

-mu

To plan or not to plan, is that the question?

The first thing that everyone asks when they find out we're going on this big trip is "What are you gonna do there?" Well, some people ask, "why on earth would you want to go to a country with malaria and typhoid fever and possible terrorist attacks" (hi, mom!), but mostly, people want to know what all we have planned.

We've given a lot of thought to how much planning ahead we should do. I'm a planner by nature, especially for trips that require a long plane flight -- I don't like flying, and if I'm gonna go somewhere far, I want to get everything I can out of it! Mu is something of a planner, too -- he looked up train schedules and had a proposed itinerary for us within a few days of getting the international flights! But, he (and I, to a smaller degree) also wanted to have flexibility in case we found things we wanted to do that hadn't been on our original list.

As you probably gathered from the trains post, we did end up planning a lot of stuff ahead of time. The reason we decided to err on the side of more planning is that our priorities (sleeping well and feeling safe on trains), the distances between places (large enough that many trains are overnight), and the fact that Indian and Thai trains both sell out quickly all meant that we really did need to decide which places we wanted to go to. Plus, we're going during relatively high season, so once we figured out where we'd be, it also made sense to book hotels. The balance to this is that we haven't booked very many activities, so that once we get to places, we can decide what (and how much) we feel like doing. The few activities we've booked are ones that we feel strongly about and that are harder to arrange on the spot -- a day of ziplines in Chiang Mai, for example, a tiger safari in a national park in India, a camel trek in Jaisalmer. Mostly, though, we'll probably use our guide book and suggestions from hotels to meander around cities.

I guess all this puts us on the pretty planned side of things. I'm OK with this, though I think Mu would rather we had more time and money and were able to be more spontaneous. I tell him, we can have a less-planned adventure when we've saved up enough to travel for a whole year!

So how do you all travel? Pre-plan, or take it as it comes?

The adventure that is the Indian rail system, part 1/?

Despite the fact that we are still in the US, our adventure has already begun. Because we want to travel around India by train (I don't do planes very happily, and Mu likes trains just fine, and besides, it's a lot cheaper), we have had the pleasure of dealing with the online booking system for Indian trains. Now, I know that I should be grateful for the fact that I can do this online at all, and believe me, I am. However, it doesn't mean that I enjoyed the process.

I should first give you an idea of the scale of this undertaking. Out of our 33 days total for this trip (which includes drive time to and from LAX), we will be sleeping on trains 9 of the nights, 7 of those in India and the other 2 in Thailand. In addition to that, we'll be taking a few daytime trains in India for the shorter hops. Since Indian trains are notoriously crowded and insane, and we want to be able to get good sleep as much as possible, all this meant that we had to book way ahead of time in order to make sure we got higher class tickets, which sell out quickly.

Indian train tickets go on sale 90 days out, so we, being organized and dorky, put reminders in our Google calendars to make sure we booked our tickets as quickly as possible. With the time difference, this was pretty convenient -- we would be booking at 7:30pm-ish, or so we thought. This did not, in fact, turn out to be the case. There were several other things that also did not turn out to be the case. :)

We had formulated our itinerary and figured out trains way ahead of time, so that we could just go online and book. The problems started there, though. The official Indian railway website does not allow booking without, get this, an Indian mobile number. Out of the rest of the booking sites, only one allowed the use of a non-Indian credit card, so by default, that's the one we ended up going with.

The very first day, we ran into issues. At 7:30pm, I went online, found my train, clicked the "check availibility" button, and was told that the system was not able to get data. Huh. I tried again. And again. And again. Nothing. Finally, I left to have dinner with a friend, and let Mu, who was in Texas, take over. An hour lateer, the system finally responded, huzzah! We had our first train ticket! Upon further googling, it turned out that the first hour of ticket sales is only accessible to agents in India, to book last-minute tickets. Why the site was unable to tell me this was unclear.

Over the next few weeks, we continued to run into random new and exciting errors on an almost daily basis, with the site giving us such informative error messages as "we're sorry, the system is grumpy" and "aargh! We couldn't find any trains!" Googling sometimes helped, but not always. Once, we found that it was impossible to book a train between the two stations we wanted. The train stopped at both stations, but one was not allowed to buy a ticket between the 2 -- instead of getting a ticket between station D and X, we had to buy tickets between D and Y, pay extra for the privilege, and get off a station early. Another time, we discovered that the direct train between 2 cities is cancelled in December and January due to fog, though we could still take trains around the foggy area. Yet another time, we couldn't book any tickets in 2012 because the external website's database hadn't caught up with the rail system's schedule. Some train numbers had randomly changed, apparently, and the systems were no longer in sync.

Finally, 3 weeks after we began, we got all our Indian rail tickets! We were so relieved, and hopeful that booking Thai trains would be easier. Hah. But that's a story for another post.

Travel Menorah

Since Chanukah is late this year, December 21st-28th, we needed a travel Menorah. Lighting candles on a train did not seem like a good idea, so thanks to Evil Mad Science, I just finished an LED Menorah kit.

There is a little push button switch to tell it which day is being celebrated, then it lights each LED in turn.

(And yes, I have recalculated the sunset times for each of the cities we will be in.)

I feel like a bad EE, in that this is the first time I have touched my soldering iron in years. But my skills proved good enough to assemble this simple kit.

-mu

A grand adventure is about to begin!

About 6 months ago, we (Mu and I) decided that we needed to go on a grand adventure before settling down. Never mind that we're not having kids until I'm done with grad school, anyways -- it was time to take a trip, and this seemed like reason enough. So, after some thought, we booked our flights! In about 3 weeks (well, 19 days, to be exact), we will be heading to Thailand for a week, India for 3 weeks, and Hong Kong for 16 hours! We'll be trying to blog as we go, and until then, we'll try to share some stories of our preparations. Enjoy!