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GapFiller 2023

This trip has been designed to visit sites which we hadn't been able to see on previous trips, either because we didn't have the time or because they were too difficult to reach.

We covered a lot of ground, starting in Delhi and making a big loop to finish in Mumbai.

Full map of all GapFiller 2023 pages

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Trip Report and Budget

 

(vero;2024-Feb-29)

We covered a lot of ground during this trip: we started in Delhi and ended in Mumbai, re-visiting some places we already knew quite well (Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, Mysuru and Mumbai) and discovering many new ones along the way.

You can retrace our route on this map showing our itinerary.Final budget. We ended up spending an average of 1835 Rs (20€/17£) per day for the both of us, with an average cost of Rs1205 (13€/11£) per night for a double room with attached bathroom.

Page of a typical hotel register (Varanasi). Page of a typical hotel register (Varanasi).We were there for 56 days and managed on a budget of 1835 Rs (€20/£17) per day for the two of us. More than half of it was for accommodation (56.3%), then came local transport (22.4%), food (12.3%), fees (7.3%) and other assorted stuff (1.7%). This is much in line with what we spent at the beginning of the year during our SevenUp 2023 trip in the north eastern states.

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Hotels

Taking leave of our friendly host at Bently Palace hotel in Andheri. Taking leave of our friendly host at Bently Palace hotel in Andheri. During this trip, we dropped our bags in sixteen different rooms, all with attached bathroom (except in Varanasi); we used Booking.com to book nine of them, we found the rest on the ground. We encountered quite a few refusals (even booking.com cancellations) on the ground of many hotels not accepting foreigners.

See a summary of our hotels below:

List of our hotels with price and comments.

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Our restaurant of choice in the Fort area of Mumbai. Lunch is served until 15:00 while evening shifts start at 19:30. The yellow Udupi menu is for the restaurant on the right (with the stairs) and has nothing to do with them. Our restaurant of choice in the Fort area of Mumbai. Lunch is served until 15:00 while evening shifts start at 19:30. The yellow Udupi menu is for the restaurant on the right (with the stairs) and has nothing to do with them.Food

As usual, our diet is very simple… mostly vegetable thalis in the evening, bananas, snacks, biscuits or crackers during the day, the occasional Indian sweet before going to bed, purified water and if fizzy drink, local brand only. No alcohol. We have breakfast in our room, preparing our own tea and boiling water with a heating coil, munching some biscuits or crackers with it. Pricewise, a vegetable thali will typically cost anything between 70 and 120 Rs. We treated ourselves to a few Byrianis (200-300 Rs) and developed an addiction to Kathi Rolls which we had discovered in Kolkata in Spring.

We had our best thali of the whole trip in the restaurant pictured on the right which we found by chance in the Fort area of Mumbai. It is a tiny cramped place with only three tables each sitting four people, so guests have to queue outside. On offer are delicious thalis (and nothing else) with unlimited chapatis + rice for 90 Rs or a thali with four chapatis + rice for 70 Rs. There were two of us, so we had to wait a bit longer than the others so that we could sit together but otherwise people are ushered in as soon as a guest is finished. Plates are perfunctorily washed with a gush of water and you have to dry them yourself before getting served ;-)

The bus from the Kerala Transport Corporation (KSRTC) which took us from Mysuru to Kozhikode. There are no windows only shutters, so be prepared for draughts or some blinding sun if you want to see something (and bad luck if it is raining). The bus from the Kerala Transport Corporation (KSRTC) which took us from Mysuru to Kozhikode. There are no windows only shutters, so be prepared for draughts or some blinding sun if you want to see something (and bad luck if it is raining).Transport

A defining feature of this trip has been our extensive use of trains, a convenient and incredibly cheap way of travelling in India (it made up 58% of our transport budget, a real bargain considering the distance covered). We booked all our night trains (except one) online from home: places are few and travellers many, so one has to keep on the ball and move fast. The reservation window of Indian Rail opens 120 days before the date of travel, which means one has to have a fixed schedule, something which we usually do not like very much, but in this case, the distances to cover were such that we had no real choice. And it worked perfectly well. We tend to book 3AC nowadays: the carriages have the same layout as in sleeper class but they have the added bonus of a blanket, sheets and pillow, a bit more padding on the seat plus no unbooked passengers allowed inside. Among so many trips, we had only one bad train from Parasnath to Puri which was very dirty and home to many roaming cockroaches, but all others were OK.

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh: the railway station by night. Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh: the railway station by night. Because we did not know how long we would stay in Agra, we had not booked anything for the journey Agra-Varanasi. We were not so keen on the idea of taking an expensive night bus so we went to Agra station just in case something was available. And yes! we managed to book a night train at the counter, benefiting from the Foreign quota. The only drawback was that we had to catch the train at Tundla JN, some 30 km east of Agra, but this was no issue as there was even a local shuttle bus going there from the Fort bus terminal (Bus 35, 50 Rs per person, one and a half hour in the evening rush hour). This is something to think about in the future: check for alternatives at nearby railway junctions which see more traffic than the cities themselves. And as usual, check the website of the Man in Seat 61 for everything you need to know about train travel in India.

We even used trains for smaller deplacements during the day: we booked two to one days before in second sitting or sleeper to be sure to have a seat. A good point is that stations are often in the centre of towns, so easily accessible, not so good is that trains are not always punctual: we had one case of our train stopping without any apparent reason for 3/4 hour 10 km before our destination. We were fuming!

We took a night bus from Mangalore to Kolhapur: a sleeper for 1500 Rs per person which dropped us not far from the centre before continuing to Mumbai.

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Fees

ASI, the Archeological Survey of India, is the body responsible for managing and maintaining historical sites across India, of which many can be visited free of charge. You can check their website for a list of their ticketed monuments sorted by state or a page dedicated to the World Heritage sites of India. For information, prices (as of Jan 2024) for foreigners are significantly higher than for Indian nationals (which is fair enough): as a rough guide the price of a "minor site" is 300 Rs while it is 600 Rs for major and World Heritage sites (Indians pay respectively 25 and 40 Rs).

However it is not all good with ASI and we have grown quite frustrated with them during this trip to the extent that we skipped some sites we would have visited otherwise towards the end of the trip just because they were managed by ASI. There are different reasons for this:

The uninspiring site of Warangal Fort (Telangana). The uninspiring site of Warangal Fort (Telangana).

We believe that things will smooth over in the near future: most independent travellers (like us) use nowadays an Indian SIM so being always online is not so big an issue. Plus we have read that the UPI system has been extended to G-20 foreigners and NRIs (Non Resident Indians) so this would be a way to solve the credit card issue (Google Pay would also be an alternative). But it is something to be aware of for the time being and personally we resent one more added layer of logistics to deal with on arrival on top of the sourcing of the SIM card. Long are the times gone when travel was stress free and easy!

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Miscellaneous

Not much to report here except for the purchase of an Airtel SIM on arrival at Delhi Airport. We were lucky when we arrived at their counter in the arrival hall (after having cleared customs) as we were immediately served (we passed the immigration controls speedily and our bag was one of the firsts to pop out), but ten minutes later the queue behind us was quite significant. We paid 450 Rs for a 28 days SIM which we topped up easily in Puri for further 28 days (240 Rs) at a mobile phone shop. We were told at the airport to wait a few hours and then call a certain number, quoting a code to get the number connected. This sounded really easy but turned out to be not so straight forward. We dutifully called the number again and again and always ended up in a queue going nowhere. We were near despair when we spotted an Airtel shop near Connaught Place where after two attempts a nice guy got us sorted. Not sure how we would have fared without him, we would probably have asked our hotel staff for help.

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