Rishikesh-Haridwar-Delhi-Ahmedabad-Diu

We had a change of plans while eating dinner on what was supposed to be our last night in Rishikesh before we headed off to Amritsar and then on to Dharamsala...

Fearing we were going to be traveling alongside the same pretentous hippie/traveler crowd that I had been really starting to get tired of we decided to change our plans from the "hill station" towns of the Northwest and head to a rarely traveled to town of Diu on the Arabian sea..

We are hoping that this will be a little more off the beaten path of the usual backpacker crowd and more laid back then the rest of the towns we've been to recently. Supposedly there are some pretty scenic beaches, cheap hotels, and really cheap beer.

So we canceled our train ticket to Amritsar and re booked one that left in two days going back to Delhi....as well as booked a flight from Delhi to Amdebad...

We made it back down to Delhi and found a hotel room just fine even though it was pretty late a night. The next morning (the 17th) we woke up early and tried to arrange both a hotel for that night in Ahmedabad (since we would be getting in pretty late again) and a bus the next day to Diu.

I don't know whether the phone lines are just really bad or people just didn't understand English very well but after dozens of phone calls I was unsuccessful in booking a hotel and possibly had a bus booked. Although I couldn't really tell as the girl I had talked with on the phone spoke very little English...

We decided to leave some of our luggage at the hotel we stayed at and I put a padlock on it and paid a little deposit to help insure it would still be there when we returned and we made our way to the airport, about 9 hours early, but we really didn't have much else to do. We had contemplated going to watch the Olympic torch make its way through Delhi but they wouldn't announce when it would be making its' appearance and they had overly guarded the route and didn't really let anyone near it... which kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me...

Anyways, made it to the airport and although the signs showing the status of the flights reassured me our flight was "on time" we didn't get to board until 45 minutes after our scheduled departure... After waiting on the tarmac for another half hr or so the pilots finally came rushing onto the plane claiming they were "stuck in traffic" from the torch relay and we would be leaving almost 2 hrs late... I don't really understand how the whole plane load of people managed to be there on time but the pilots didn't...

This only further added to the stress of landing in a foreign city with no hotel booked as we were now going to arrive well after midnight...

We flew on Kingfisher Airlines, which is owned by the beer company Kingfisher, and it is quite different then the rest of the airlines in India... The flight attendants, for one, wore tight little skirts in high heels. Where on the rest of the airlines the women wore Saris. And unlike flights in America our fare actually included food and a lot of it...

So we made it to Ahmedabad and got a taxi to a hotel we had found in a guide book and after a little driving around and asking for directions we were able to check in and kind of get a good nights sleep.

Since I couldn't really understand the girl on the phone when I had tried to book the bus ticket I couldn't decide if we were to be there at 9:00 am or 9:00pm.. so playing it safe we woke up early and after a little more driving around and asking for directions we made it to the travel agent. We did in fact manage to book a ticket but it wasn't until the 9:00 pm departure...

Since then we've been spending the day roaming around. Going to book stores, coffee shops, and now an Internet cafe.

There's not a lot of English spoken here...just a few key words. And they don't even speak Hindi (which we have a translation book for) but the main language it Gujarati. Which Teresa and I have no idea what any of the words look or sound like so we are kind of just winging it. Despite that fact the people here seem to be very friendly and very concerned that we make it to where we are trying to go and even though we get quite a few stares they aren't as intrusive as they are up north. Apart from the one guy sitting directly across from us on the bus from the plane last night who proceeded to take pictures of us (mainly Teresa) on his camera phone.

With any luck this time tomorrow I will be laying back on a beach on the Arabian Sea with nothing more to do for the next week or so.... I'll try to keep the blog updated