Pondi-Madurai – I: Planning :)

The idea of blog took a concrete shape with the Pondicherry-Madhurai trip. That has pushed us to start our first post with experiences of the same. We always wanted to go on a long trip (the trips before this were on weekends). As a result of which, we started looking for a holiday which can be added to the weekend so that we could plan a longer holiday. The search and planning started during Oct’07 and it was during Christmas that we could make it.

Kerala was the decided destination, to be precise Munnar in Kerala. We had our Bachelors friend Prasanth working in CA, who was with us in the initial trips also showed interest in joining us for this. We starting planning things for trip very early around Nov’07. But Prasanth was not keen on such an early planning and paid less attention.

Karthik narrates….
I started my hunt for places to be visited in Kerala and I didn’t think much before zeroing in on Munnar. I do not know the roots of this desire to visit Munnar, but I always imagined Munnar as a place full of greenery and breath-taking natural beauty. After a lot of reading on web about the place and reviews by travellers, especially the one on mouthshut.com with complete details, the longing to feel the air of Munnar increased.

Having Periyar Wildlife sanctuary on our list made the trip more interesting and exciting, because a quick search on google says it is one of the world’s most fascinating natural wildlife sanctuaries. Ready acceptance from Shivudu & Prasanth pushed me towards the next step – a tourist package. I found one particular tourist package very attractive – a tour of 6 days to Munnar, Thekkady (periyar wildlife sanctuary) and Guruvayur conducted by KSTDC (Karnataka Tourism) costing around Rs4,500.00 per head. The only drawback with the package could be that it starts on Wednesday evening and ends on Monday morning. In Nov’07 our attempt to book that package failed as I had to stay back in Bangalore for work.

Somehow after that failed attempt we decided to go on our own, without the help of a tourist package. The planning started towards the end of Nov’07 with me taking a leave for the whole last week of Dec’07 (from 24 – 28 Dec’07). When planning detailed itenary for the trip I came across a rafting package at the Periyar wildlife sanctuary which sounded very exciting. Shivudu and Prasanth were equally excited about the rafting. We wanted an optimal utilization of time because Shivudu & Prasanth stay in Hyderabad and I live in Bangalore. So, we decided that Chennai would be the intermediate meeting place for journey towards Munnar. Then the plan took the following shape:

Plan-1 (4 days from Bangalore & 5 days from Hyderabad):
21 Dec :- Starting to Chennai from our places
22 Dec :- Chennai sight seeing, Train to Madurai at night.
23 Dec :- Meenakshi Temple. By Night – reach Munnar & go around.
24 Dec :- Till 3:00PM – Munnar sight seeing. Leave for Periyar Wildlife sanctuary. Night – stay at Periyar (Should start early morning for rafting).
25 Dec :- Morning – hiking & rafting. Leave for Bangalore at Night.
26 Dec:- Fun @ Bangalore. Train to Hyderabad at Night.

But we had a sneaky feeling that the trip would become hectic. We also had other plans in our mind – cancel Periyar sanctuary and enjoy the beauty of Munnar or reach Cochin on 25 Dec’07 morning, sightseeing and catch a train to Bangalore on 25th evening. Our second plan looked like:

Plan-2 (4 days from Bangalore & 5 days from Hyderabad):
21 Dec :- Starting to Chennai from our places
22 Dec :- Chennai sight seeing, Train to Madurai at night.
23 Dec :- Meenakshi Temple. By Night – reach Munnar & go around.
24 Dec :- Munnar sight seeing. night @ Munnar or reach Cochin.
25 Dec :- Morning – Cochin sight seeing and catch train to Bangalore in night.
26 Dec:- Fun @ Bangalore. Train to Hyderabad at Night.

These are the two plans. The first one is not only hectic but also risky because little delay in Periyar could cost us as much as missing train to Bangalore. Among things to note, journey durations in the trip: Hyderabad – Chennai: 12 hrs train, Chennai – Madurai: 9 hours train, Madurai – Munnar: 6 hours bus, Munnar – Cochin/Periyar: 3/5 hours bus, Cochin – Bangalore: 12 hrs train, Bangalore to Hyderabad: 10 hrs train.

Prasanth was unhappy about the whole plan saying it would be tough to manage ourselves. Then I went to the tourist offices in R T Nagar (Bangalore). They all gave up saying that, Munnar will be very difficult to visit at that time of the year as there will be heavy rush. It was very disappointing to drop Munnar from our trip . Dropping Munnar for trip turned our focus towards places in Tamilnadu. It is so fascinating to see things change so instantly . We came up with the detailed plan for the same:

Plan 3 – Days of Journey: 22, 23, 24, 25 Dec’07

22 Dec’07: Around Chennai
09:00AM Reach Chennai
Kanchipuram, Mamallapuram, Muttukadu, Vandalur
07:00PM Back to Chennai
09:00PM Start for Madurai
09:30PM Catch the Train: Pandian Exp (2637)

23 Dec’07: Around Madurai
06:15AM Reach Madurai (Railway Station)
Alagarkoil, Meenakshi Temple, Tirmumalai Nayakar Palace
10:00PM Start for KanyaKumari

24 Dec’07: Around KanyaKumari
04:00AM Reach kanyaKumari
Vattakottai (Circular Fort), Suchindram, Udayagiri Fort
Holy Annual festival of R C Church is celebrated in the fourth week of December.
05:15PM Catch the Train: Kanyakumari Exp (2634)

25 Dec’07: Around Pondicherry
03:55AM Reach VILLUPARAM JN
05:00AM Reach Pondicherry
06:00AM Reach Pondicherry
Lots of beaches and Aurobindo Ashram
01:00PM Start to Chennai
06:00PM Catch Train to Hyderabad

The saturday just before the week our trip was going to commence I was in College. That is when we came up with the above plan. The very next day Shivudu went to Mehdipatnam and booked 2 tickets in Tatkal to Chennai for himself and Prasanth. Everything was in place – group geared up, booked tickets, did all the planning. There is nothing that could go wrong (Is there anything you could think of ??), but what happened on the trip was entirely different from what we had planned. The count of the group wasn’t three as planned. Though we did reach Chennai, we never visited Kanchi, Mahabalipuram, Kanyakumari.

As the saying goes – “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken” – we had lots of new and unanticipated experience on our trip ranging from failing to catch trains, travelling in a new bus every two hours in night to incidents like meeting people who want to stretch legs on seat but not offer the seat to us, people who offered us money when we lost our atm card, etc etc. Our entire trip reminds us of the quote “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving”.

Interested to know about the actual trip the authors went and their experiences – find it from the continuation post on the same topic very soon

Juvenile Travellers: What, Why and Who

This will be our first post and will be followed by posts, in which we will be relating our experiences at the places we have travelled. We have been to some of the places around us which include Horseley Hills, Delhi, Chandigarh, Kulu-Manali, Agra, Mysore, Pondicherry, Madurai, Mussourie etc. This post will be similar to the “About the Writers” section of this blog. This is totally intentional, as we wanted our readers to have an easy access to the introductory post of this blog.

It was one fine evening during our graduation days @ IIIT-H when Karthik said, “I have an aim to travel the entire world during my lifetime” looking into the calm sky. “You stole my words” was the reaction from Shivudu. That marked the birth of the idea of travelling and the journey of two juvenile travellers. As the saying goes “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”, we decided to start with places around or closer to us and slowly increase our span to other places in India, then to as many places as possible in the rest of the world. We share the common dream of visiting whole of the World one day

The first thing we did after deciding that we would be taking to travelling seriously was to buy the book “Lonely Planet India“. We feel that this book has changed our view of travelling. You can’t imagine the fine details which this book gives about a particular place. It gives details such as which room is clean in a particular hotel, which room offers a good view, which roadways bus goes to which place, what to eat at different restaurants, etc. Very often, we would be referring to lonely planet in our posts in this blog. We will be describing how we benefited by following lonely planet and also how we suffered by not following this book. Being lazy at times to refer to that book lead to some tongue-biting incidents.

We travelled around to some places, but it was during our trip to Pondicherry-Madurai that we decided to pen our experiences and share information with the people around us. It is at this time, when the idea of starting a blog crossed our minds. But that never took off for at least for the next three months. Then the day came when we decided, “If we want to do something that interests us, you’ve got to take time out for it”.

Then we started looking for a proper title to our blog. The idea was to have this blog as a common forum for travellers –wait, we will not call ourselves as Travellers at this stage, we will just refer ourselves as people who love travelling– to discuss about their experiences, plan their next trip etc. We also wanted to emphasize the fact that we are just infants when it comes to travelling. While discussing the same with karthik’s sister, she immediately suggested the word “Juvenile” which she came across in her botany text. This really pushed us hard and thus we came up with the title “A Tryst for Juvenile travellers” which means “a meeting place for people who love travelling”. And the caption “A place to share landscapes of a traveller’s mind” is designed keeping in mind a future state, where not only we share our experiences but also others.

After discussing with each other, we have come up with a format for the posts. We will start of by giving all the possible itenaries that can be followed for the trip, this will include the actual proposed itenary before we embark on our journey, which we believe will definitely have some modifications after the trip is over. Then, we will relate our experiences and problems faced during our journey. This might be like, how we managed to find out about a place though we did not know the native language or how Lonely Planet helped us in knowing about the place we were touring etc etc. As the saying goes “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”, we will also try to provide details of the secret beauties and destinations of the place which the travel books or guides fail to provide. We will also be providing a link to picasaweb, where we will be uploading the snaps we have taken during our tour.

The writers strongly believe that there would be many people who would have the desire to travel, but owing to their daily course of life might have shelved their dreams. Here, We write to demonstrate that there are ways to relish that dream to travel (in bits and pieces); and also give them a push to start the journey to discover the world. We would be extremely happy if someone could join us on our future trips.

This blog will also try to fight against the dormant nature people develop, which has its roots in lack of proper information to new places. It provides people with options of places to explore, documents proper information about the place along with stay & travel, suggestions, chalks out trips to suit your schedules and much more. We will do all these by narrating our experiences.

We also came up with an idea of starting a group consisting of people who love travelling. Talking about the group we want to start, it will consist of people with similar interests when it comes to travelling. We do not have any reservations regarding the people who would like to join us. Anybody of any age or sex who loves travelling is welcome to join us. Or if you have any experiences, during your travel, which you would like share with us, you are always welcome to mail them to us @ travellers.tryst@gmail.com. We can use this blog as a common platform to discuss all the issues regarding our travel plans. Through this blog, we can suggest places to visit, we can motivate people to come for the trip, we can plan our trips etc etc.

We also have an faint idea of a travel kit which we feel, we should carry when we are travelling. This is something we have thought about during our last trip to Madurai and Pondicherry. The first and foremost thing that can be included in the kit is a shawl (it is very advantageous to carry a shawl as it can be used to protect you from cold and also can be used as a bed sheet. It will also be of light weight), we feel that this will be the most important and mandatory part of the kit. Other things can be a first aid kit (containing some basic medicines for headache, fever, food poisoning etc), a box containing tissue papers. We have not finalized the items that would go into this kit . We will keep you updated regarding this.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime“, is the famous saying from Mark Twain. So friends, lets begin our journey to end our prejudice, narrow-mindedness and start coming out of ourselves into this beautiful world…..