Odds and Ends

We're getting closer to departure day, yay! I've gotten lots of emails from you all about postcards, yay! If anyone else wants one and hasn't let me know, you should do so soon! Lots of small things are coming together, but not much new is happening, so I thought I'd have another post of assorted trip-related tidbits.

-- I don't know if I mentioned this, but we're going on a camel trek in Jaisalmer, which is in the dessert in Northwestern-ish India (I say ish because it's not actually that far north, but all the way west. Midwestern India? Anyhow.). The camel trek involves being driven on a jeep somewhere outside the city, riding camels for a few hours out to dunes (or possibly a village? or a village in the dunes?), camping out in the dessert overnight, and then taking camels and jeep back to the city. We've heard that it's an awesome experience, despite being kinda touristy, so we're doing it! We did our research a while ago and emailed a bunch of places, asking for prices and description of their packages. Got several responses, selected one, booked...and then, a month later, suddenly got an answer from another one, which was not only absurdly delayed, but also just absurd. It started with "Greetings of the day...!!!!," included lines such as "I hope you understand what i meant?" (which is only funny, I suppose, if you imagine it said in a Godfather-like voice, as Mu and I did), asked us to "please clear the category as it will be according to the Budget" (huh?), and concluded with a very optimistic "Hope it's clear?" Well, it really wasn't, but there we are.

-- We haven't really told people our general itinerary, have we? We will be in Thailand for the first week of the trip, mostly in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, but with a few day trips. Then, on Christmas day, we fly to Kolkatta to spend the following three weeks taking trains across northern India, going east to west. We're not making it to southern India at all, just not enough time. Then, at the end, we fly back through Hong Kong, this time with a 16 hour layover! Not much, but enough for a whirlwind tour of the city.

-- I think I promised the story of Thai train bookings, but it's really not long enough to have its own post, so here it is, instead. We really thought the Thai trains would be easier, especially since we only needed two. Well. We were wrong. First, the site wouldn't let me register, just kept giving errors. Then, after we realized that Mu had registered in the past and we could use his account, it turned out that the train we wanted to book to Chiang Mai didn't have any 2-person first class cabins -- it either offered singles (which we didn't want because we don't really want to be in separate rooms!) or open-plan second class sleepers. Sigh. We ended up booking a different train, which worked slightly less well with our schedule but was close enough, and had the cabins we wanted. When booking the train from Chiang Mai back to Bangkok, the site was down for about 3 days, by which time the train we wanted was sold out. We ended up having to get a later train, which only had the above-mentioned singles. And then, of course, there were the Bangkok floods, which are still affecting transit. Our trains were actually cancelled for a while, but they seem to be going now, just with a delay for a re-route. We shall see how this works in practice. :) We aren't really time-constrained on any of these rides, so delays shouldn't affect us much.

Well, I think that's all for now. Only 10 more days to go!