It is another December, this time. I was thinking of Rajasthan for some time and Sujoy too looked very interested. Sujoy definitely is more diligent than me. At least he was at that time. He did lot of research about possible travel routes and it looked not too difficult to plan a good route although the cost, which included airfare, was not something that could easily go down the throat. Remember that this was before the era of low-cost air-travel. One-way flight to Delhi would cost you ten grands. One way to make it work was to convert the air-trip to train-travel. Only problem was getting the booking in train, all daily trains were booked two months ahead. Sujoy found a travel agent who said that he did arrange this kind of trips but it could be bit costly considering that Rajasthan was hot in the tourists' agenda this year. We did have the courage to ask how costly it would actually be and answer almost knocked me off the chair. Sujoy thought we could take his help only to book the hotels and the travel agent was a very willing and customer-friendly person. He said he would get back to us in next couple of days. After four days when he did not call us, we called him and we were told that the person who spoke to us was out of town. We did get the answer finally after another two days and the answer was "all hotels were booked"!
"We could go home instead", Sujoy suggested. An option that still looked better than wasting the Christmas holidays in office.
"How about visiting Madhya Pradesh?"
"MP?", Sujoy's eyes had muliple exclamation marks. I said, "Look, you heard about Saachi Stupa
and you have not seen it. MP is also known to have largest habitat for tigers and we can stay in one of the tiger reserves for few days [excitement of seeing a tiger in his natural reserve was something that I was betting on]. More importantly since MP is not high on others' agenda this time, we may get booking too and it may not hurt our wallet a lot"
I thought I made a good argument but I was not sure. Sujoy called me after two days and asked about trains to book and I felt that one couldn't expect a faster result. We decided that we will travel by train till Bhopal. We will stay there for couple of days to go around Bhopal and visit Saachi. From there we would go south and visit Kanha and Bandavgarh tiger reserve forests. We would travel to either Kanha or BandahvGarh by road depending on where we get booking first. On the return leg we will go to Jabalpur and pick the train from there. We decided that we would keep the plan flexible except the part that involves train travel since train booking was not very easy to get in short notice. Other reason was that we really did not know much about MP and therefore were not sure how much one could stick to the plan even if one could make one.
Sujoy did all the train booking when we noticed that we would not be able to make both he national parks within the time-budget that we had and decided we will settle for Bandavgarh alone. As you guessed rightly, another [and very strong] reason was that we could not find a tourist lodge that had available rooms.
[..to be continued with photos]
"We could go home instead", Sujoy suggested. An option that still looked better than wasting the Christmas holidays in office.
"How about visiting Madhya Pradesh?"
"MP?", Sujoy's eyes had muliple exclamation marks. I said, "Look, you heard about Saachi Stupa
and you have not seen it. MP is also known to have largest habitat for tigers and we can stay in one of the tiger reserves for few days [excitement of seeing a tiger in his natural reserve was something that I was betting on]. More importantly since MP is not high on others' agenda this time, we may get booking too and it may not hurt our wallet a lot"
I thought I made a good argument but I was not sure. Sujoy called me after two days and asked about trains to book and I felt that one couldn't expect a faster result. We decided that we will travel by train till Bhopal. We will stay there for couple of days to go around Bhopal and visit Saachi. From there we would go south and visit Kanha and Bandavgarh tiger reserve forests. We would travel to either Kanha or BandahvGarh by road depending on where we get booking first. On the return leg we will go to Jabalpur and pick the train from there. We decided that we would keep the plan flexible except the part that involves train travel since train booking was not very easy to get in short notice. Other reason was that we really did not know much about MP and therefore were not sure how much one could stick to the plan even if one could make one.
Sujoy did all the train booking when we noticed that we would not be able to make both he national parks within the time-budget that we had and decided we will settle for Bandavgarh alone. As you guessed rightly, another [and very strong] reason was that we could not find a tourist lodge that had available rooms.
[..to be continued with photos]
