Touring in India, Bhutan and Nepal

Was it worth it?

Our tour of India, Bhutan and Nepal was certainly a bucket-list for my wife and me as well as our friends who accompanied us. It was also one of the longest trips we’ve ever taken—we spent more than three weeks away from home. Without question, this was the most expensive trip we’ve ever taken. Was it worth it? Yes!

I’m a huge proponent of travel. I love it, I write about it, I’m something of travel evangelist. There are many different types of travel that can be rewarding in widely varying ways. There is much to be said for high-activity adventure trips such as skiing or diving. At the same time, sitting on a tropical beach with a mai tai and a good book may be just what you need. A trip like ours to India and beyond was neither of those. It was an omni-sensory experience.

Every day we reached a point of sensory and information overload. The sights, the smells, the sounds, the tastes, were well outside our norms. We needed some downtime at the end of each day just to unpack and decompress all these inputs. It was sometimes exhausting, both physically and mentally.

With regard to the history and the cultures of these new places, I realized early in our tour just how little I know. The same is true of the religions we immersed ourselves in, mainly Hinduism and Buddhism. I found them bewildering, what with millions of gods and their stories, and rituals and customs so foreign to us: how to dress, how to marry, how to die, how to grieve, how to eat, how to indulge cattle in the middle of the road. It gave me reason to admire and be grateful for the simplicity of our culture and our religion.

The culture shock most of us living in the western world and visiting India for the first time experience is quite real. The density, the apparent disorder, the evident poverty and all-too-present misery are immediate and inescapable. The sheer humanity is overwhelming. These all give rise—at least they did in me—to reflection on just how incredibly good we have it in our own lives. I say good as opposed to betterbecause I am not blind to the misery I see in my own world nor the joy I saw on the faces of so many people on our trip. We have it easier perhaps. And we take it all too often for granted. So, yes, it was worth it. If you haven’t been, go.

Kensington Tours

We are independent travelers. We do our own research, and we select and book our own flights and hotels. Our schedules are our own, and we are free to change plans on a whim. This is by choice, not necessity. We prefer it this way. There are, however, some trips where we believe using the services of an experienced tour operator is a better option. Our recent trip to India, Bhutan and Nepal is an example of a trip where I felt that advice, structure and on-the ground assistance were called for.

There are many great companies out there that provide these services. We chose to use Kensington Tours, a US-based company that offers a wide array of tour packages around the world. We considered many options, including using a firm that specialized in India. I will admit that I did not do exhaustive research before making my choice. I chose Kensington primarily on the basis of a recommendation from friends we trust

For this trip, we knew that we did not want a pre-packaged tour, or to join a larger group. We would be two couples who wanted to put together our own private tour, one that moved at our pace and that covered our own interests. For one thing, we did not want was to schedule ourselves into a frantic pace that required changing hotels nightly. We preferred to see each location in more depth and without the pressure of having to keep moving to stay on schedule. We wanted to stay two or three nights in each hotel whenever practical.

We were very pleased with Kensington Tours. The agent with whom we arranged our trip, Sunita Singh, was an expert on India and a pleasure to work with. Their local staff was always there as scheduled, professional and competent. The quality of the guides was excellent. The vehicles were clean, comfortable, filled with snacks, water, and sanitizing aids, and the drivers courteous and helpful. We always felt safe. Whenever we wished to change our program, our guides and the staff responded with the flexibility we had hoped for.

One incident on a long trip that was otherwise crisis-free speaks to the quality of the Kensington Team. I, the most experienced of world-travelers, stupidly left my iPad in a security tray while being screened at the Delhi airport. I did not discover my loss until the following day, in Varanasi. Of course, personal panic ensued as I thought of all the work I had saved on the device, but not yet backed up to the cloud. A few calls with the Kensington staff in Delhi and an exchange of identifying and authorizing documents led to my recovery of the iPad two days later as we passed through DEL again en route to Agra. A special shout-out of thanks to Hitesh Duseja and his colleagues for a great response.

Kensington Tours deserves much credit for the success of our trip. I can recommend them with enthusiasm for anyone seeking the services of an experienced travel planner/tour operator.

Guides

Me with our guide in Jaipur with his mentor, now retired, who twice served as guide to President Clinton

A great guide can make a place come alive, can make sense of the new and unknown and can provide invaluable insights into local customs and traditions. We were very lucky on our trip to have had a series of guides all of whom were top-notch. In India we had a different guide in each city and, in some cases, a special guide for a particular tour. We worked with a total of eight different guides in the three countries we visited. All were male, most were academicians—two had published books on the subjects we were discussing. One was a lawyer. Each displayed a distinct personality. They held strong personal views and were unafraid to express them.

The guides in India tended to be older, say past mid-life. Our guide in Bhutan, Chencho was only thirty. He was enthusiastic, tireless, and patient. He was passionate about his country and its traditions. We appreciated the fact that he was with us from our arrival in Bhutan until our departure five days later, giving us a chance to get to know him better than we had any of the guides in India.

Hotels

I saw in our extended trip to India and beyond an opportunity to experience for the first time the hospitality of some of the region’s most successful hotel groups. We were all impressed with what they offered. Hotels are a vital part of most Indian tours for Americans, or visitors from any part of the developed world for that matter. They serve as a refuge from the noise, dirt and chaos that surround them. Our primary choice was to stay at Taj properties. That included their hotels in Delhi, Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and Thimphu. All were outstanding, both in facilities and service. We also spent one short night at the Oberoi in Gurgaon, arriving during a driving thunderstorm. We were warmly greeted by the management and upgraded to extraordinary suites to make up for the brevity of our stay.

It is fair to say we all agreed that our favorite property was the Leela Palace in Udaipur. The lakefront setting, dramatic architecture and top-notch service made it understandable why this has been voted best hotel in the world by the readers of Travel+Leisure magazine. From arrival to departure, our stay here was perfect. Ingress and egress via a water taxi was much more of a pleasure than an inconvenience. We were treated royally, befitting a palace guest. Our arrival welcome was spectacular and was followed by a tour of the property and its collections by a local guide. A local priest even came and performed a welcoming blessing ritual at an ancient temple that has been restored on the grounds.

There were other fascinating features at the other hotels we visited as well, such as traditional music and festive dances. In Jaipur we got to witness a massive wedding that began at dusk, climaxed with the ceremony itself at midnight and ended with bride and groom departing in a fairy-tale horse-drawn carriage at dawn. At the Taj Tashi in Thimphu, Allie and Coco took a turn at archery, Bhutan’s national sport.

Anyone planning a trip like ours to India would be well-advised to rely on the hotels of the three best-known Indian groups, Taj, Leela and Oberoi (as well as their Trident brand). You will not be disappointed.

During our long weekend in Dubai on our way to India, we stayed at a Jumeirah hotel, the Creekside, giving us a chance to try another non-US chain of five-star properties. The rooms, food service, pool and other facilities there were excellent. The fitness center was exceptionally large and well-equipped, perhaps owing to its location adjacent to the venue for the Dubai Open Tennis Tournament which was being played during our stay.

I almost forgot to mention the first hotel we stayed at on the day we left home, the delightful TWA at the JFK airport. It’s a novelty hotel, but one that works brilliantly. I have long been a fan of taking daytime flights across the Atlantic. JFK offers more of these possibilities than any other North American airport, but most depart in the morning, too early for connections from other parts of the US. That provides a perfect opportunity to experience this museum-like hotel. I highly recommend it.

Airlines

Enjoying the Business Class Bar on Emirates

We completed our trip just before the global coronavirus pandemic brought the airline industry to its knees. I hope these blows don’t prove fatal to any competitors. We chose to go to and from India via the Middle East rather than Europe. This provided an opportunity to experience the highly lauded business-class service of two of the region’s most successful airlines. We flew outbound from New York on Emirates in an A380. It was easy to see why this service is so favorably reviewed. After waiting on the flight in a spacious, well-appointed lounge, passengers are invited to board from a skyway directly into the upper-level business-class cabin of the aircraft. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. The seats were roomy, the screens over-sized and the service gracious. The highlight of this flight is the bar forward of the cabin where you can stretch-out, congregate and socialize with other guests. This brought back memories of trans-pacific flights long ago on 747s that had bars on the upper deck like this.

We returned home from Kathmandu on Qatar Airways. Again, the service was extraordinary. Our flight to Doha was uneventful, but the lounge at the airport there was huge and extravagant. What really set this apart from any other recent flying experience we’ve had was the seating on the flight from Doha to JFK. They call these Q-Suites. Allie and I shared side-by-side seats in the center of the plane, an A350. The seats are separated by a partition that can be fully retracted. Each seat has an outside door that can be closed to create a cozy cabin with much more privacy than most. When requested, the staff makes the two seats into a surprisingly comfortable double bed, complete with a mattress, a thick blanket and a very nice set of pajamas for each passenger. Since the doors surrounding this love-nest are only about five feet high, please do not assume you have real privacy!

We took numerous domestic flights in India. None was remarkable, in either a positive or negative sense. I was surprised to learn that the country’s legacy national carrier, Air India, is no longer a dominant player. They are now the third-largest domestic airline after IndiGo and Spice Jet (slogan: “Red. Hot. Spicy.”). IndiGo has nearly 50% of the domestic market. They are billed as a “no-frills” airline. Having experienced the service of their two nearest competitors, I hate to imagine what “frills” they might be lacking.

Wine?

I should headline this as “Believe it or Not.” I tried locally produced wine in each country! One reason for my experimentation, other than a writer’s curiosity, was the paucity of any decent or fairly-priced imports. I actually had several different Indian wines, both reds and whites. Here’s the truly surprising thing: they were not that bad! Let me start with the losers. The wines I tried in Bhutan and Nepal were barely acceptable. I would describe them as equivalent to what you would find on the grocery-store shelves here, but on the bottom shelf. Too sweet and overly fruity. Several of the Indian wines were a notch above that, perhaps in the middle-shelf. In all cases, I felt these wines were offered at prices that were a fair indication of what one should expect of them. While the exotic foods in these countries are an attraction in themselves, their wines are certainly not.

Afterthoughts