INDIA – Day 1 & 2 (5-6 November)

Yep, we went to India November 2018.  How cool is that?  We booked through the  Trent Hills Chamber of Commerce who hosted this trip and we traveled with Indus to India for 11 days and 10 nights.  Well, 8 days and sort of 8 nights.

The rest was on the plane or waiting in the airports which is super fun ! ……………………said no one ever…………….

I am going to break my India Blog down by days or it will be long and people will stop reading it.

We left our house Monday 5 November at 10 a.m., picked up some people in Campbellford and then 2 more people in Port Hope followed by the drive to the Toronto Airport.

Me at the Toronto airport where apparently I have no friends lol

 

We had a layover in Amsterdam for 4-5 hours.  Interesting airport and very busy.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd  a few more flying hours to arrive in Delhi.  FINALLY, arriving in Delhi about 230 a.m. Wednesday morning 7 November.  Now Delhi is about 10 1/2 hours ahead of us here in Ontario, Canada.  So this really messes with my head trying to figure it out and sort out how long here and there, so I’m not going to bother !  Suffice to say, we were tired, the trip was long and we were happy to get off the planes/out of airports.

 

So to summarize our trip on the first page, we were 2 nights in Delhi, 2 nights in Agra, 1 night at Chambal Safari Lodge, 2 nights in Jaipur and 1 night in Mandawa.  The weather was beautiful and hot, we had rain one night while in Mandawa.  However, the smog was another story.  Holy cow.  More on that later………

We were there during their festival called Diwali which runs from late October to early November.  Diwali is the Hindu Festival of Lights, lots of decorations all through the city and fireworks, lots of fireworks.

Amit was our guide, he was with us 24/7 our entire trip and he was great.  It was a pleasure to meet him and have him be our guide.  A very smart and pleasant man.  Our driver was Virender and his helper was Iqbal.  They were all terrific and were very good to us all.

So……………here are a few facts about India, obviously there is a lot more information, but you can look that up yourself!

India is the world’s oldest, largest and continuous civilization composed of 29 states and 7 union territories.  It is one of the largest democracies and 2nd largest English-speaking country and until the 18th century, India was the richest country in the world.

Amit (our tour guide) told us that India has the largest postal system in the world with more than 150,000 post offices.  I don’t know why I found that weird.   Also there are more than 300,000 active mosques and they have the largest Hindu population.   Things that were invented or originated in India include:  Chess, Yoga, calculus, trigonometry, algebra, decimal system, the game of Snakes and Ladders, Buddhism, Jainism.

Bollywood is the largest movie industry in terms of output, largest number of movies made each year.