Eurotrip: Prologue.. with 20/20 hindsight

So as most of you know, I had been planning a Eurotrip earlier this year. Well.. I did it. Backpacked across western Europe.. had a crazy schedule. Covered 6 countries(1 city per country :)) in 15 days. Here's something for people who are planning to do so too but just couldn't get off their collective asses or think its too expensive or think its dangerous or don't know how to go about it.

Things I did right, and thing you SHOULD do too:

• Get a good backpack. Can't stress this enough. You have to carry something equal to twice the size of your torso, about 15-20kg, on your back. You might have to walk a mile or two(unless you are rolling in money, in which case don't backpack). Get a good backpack.. I got a 65lt Osprey Waypoint.. worth every single penny.
• If you are directionally retarded(for the lack of a better word), like I am, get a friend to tag along with you who isn't. Frankly, I need a GPS to walk to my restroom(that's bathroom for the non-American junta), so treading my way across the cobbled streetways of Prague was an unlikely possibility. My friend just used to look at the map and used to guide me to all the places like a local.
• Buy a guidebook. There's no shame walking around with the fat book in a foreign place. I just used to mark the places we HAD to visit and we MIGHT visit, factor in the time to travel, and time allotted to the city, and use TSP to do the rest :)
• Concentrate on soaking up the culture and the history, not just looking at buildings. Just go to all the small alleyways, drink the local wine, taste the local favourite dish in a bistro. Look for places that are not really close to a touristy place (like the restaurant right next to Eiffel tower or on the Old town square in Prague). Its fun talking to complete strangers in a different country.. the language barriers just fade away.
• Surprise yourself. I'm not the artsy/emo sortta guy, try to analyze everything, so I was vary of visiting any museums. But boy was I wrong. Went to about 3-4 museums, took the audio tour in each one of them. It is one thing reading about it in history books and quite different experience altogether to really see them. You have no idea how human you feel after seeing/touching artifacts from 2000BC, paintings of Van Gough, Remembrandt and Da vinci, pages from the diary of Anne Frank ( I can go on and on about the things I saw and felt.. if you care to listen just call me and I'll eat you head off with my long philosophical rant about humanity and mankind in general). Bottom line, don't judge yourself.
• Suck it up when need be. I'm a lacto ova vegetarian, that been said, I had meat in Europe. Not that I couldn't find Subway/Salad bars/Indian vegetarian restaurants in Europe.. I just didn't want a superficial view of the cities. As I said earlier, I wanted to soak up the local culture and custom. After all, what Eurotrip is complete without the German currywursts. :)
• Relax when you need to. Backpacking is a hectic affair. If you are not a marathon runner, backpacking tires you out soon. Just kick back and call it a day early on.
• If you are into photography, carry lots of memory card. I carried 10GBs in CF cards, filled about 8GB. Shoot some artsy good pictures, but when push comes to shove, shoot anything and everything. You are making memories here, not trying to sell prints. That being said, a non-photog friend helps. I used to study the composition, look at photogenic stuff and angles and then take the pics. The non-photog friend used to cry "photo please" at every damn place, so sometimes I used to shoot photos, begrudgingly, without properly composing the picture. Although irritated then, I'm thankful to him for pushing me take all those photos. Shot about 650 photos.
• Check out craigslist and other local websites to find cheap accommodation. Some people let you crash on their couch or just rent a room for a night for pretty decent price. Hostels again are not that expensive. Avoid backpacking in summer.. just too many tourists in Europe during that time. I went in autumn.. just the right weather.. just the right crowd.
• Any backpacker should know the importance of a towel (what? you haven't read hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?.. what are you doing here). Please O please don't carry a thick towel, its hard to dry and gets stinky pretty soon.

Things I did wrong. Learn from my mistakes:

• I booked accommodation and inter-country travel tickets just 3 weeks before the departure date (that too when I HAD to because I needed it for the shengen visa interview). Ideally you should always travel at night so you can sleep on the bus/train/plane and keep the days for sightseeing. Unfortunately we were cursed to travel during the day, which made our days shorter by 4 hours.
• If you are a photographer, carry all your gear, all your lenses, even your big ass tripod, the backpack is gonna be heavy anyway, but atleast you wont crib about needing an extra 5mm of focal length to get the perfect shot, or about not having a tripod for capturing the eye popping nightlife in Europe (unless you like the shitty ISO 1600 pics of course).
• Get a proper shoe. I had a relatively new Nike Air, but all the cushiony, airy, squeaky comfort goes for a toss when you are lugging 20kgs around and walking for miles at end. Within 2-3 days, your feet will conspire against each other to kill you. Research shoes before you get one for backpacking.
• Get lots of socks, lots. Atleast get a pair for each day (or you can use the laundromats which are easily accessible from the hostels). Failure to comply to this advice might result in a "biohazard" symbol sutured on your forehead.

So what I did in Europe, i.e Paris,Zurich,Munich,Prague, Brussels, Brugge and Amsterdam, is a completely different blog post.. stay tuned in.

Call of the wild

So after a month of nightmares and living in constant fear of escaping the orbit of earth(yeah.. I feared that the most.. weird).. I finally sky dived at Monterey. It was an experience I'll cherish for life. Big cheers to Bay Jump. The tandem masters and the photographers had made me super comfortable and were totally professional with 1000+ jumps under their belt.
Now that I did it, I find myself wondering why did I do it... I am definitely not an adrenaline junkie , nor was I "not scared" of jumping.. probably I was just arrogant about doing it.. more arrogant than I was scared.

The jump was from a height of 15000 ft and the chutes came up at 5000ft. Thats a free fall of 10000 ft. It took about 1.5 minutes to cover that distance, 15-20 secs of which were wasted in shouting, screaming and getting used to the fall. In the remaining few seconds I just felt numb, not scared.. just plain numb, and appreciated the beauty that engulfed my pshyche. The scenery was breathtaking.. mountain peaks rising from the clouds, birds flying below me, the bay with its extraordinarily sparkly water and just the visible curvature of the earth... neither words nor any photograph can do justice to that.
Check out this video.. I look scared to death(which is about 10% how I actually felt.. kudos to the videographer) and my vest got fluffed up giving my tummy an extraordinarily rotund appearance.

Trip to India...

I have already written about my travel ordeal, so would be writing about the places I visited: Kanpur, Bangalore, Goa and Chennai.

KANPUR: For those of you who dont know me well enough, I spent the first 18 years of my life here (that does make me sound old). I have no particular affinity to place (yes i am heartless) and went only because my parents live there and to visit my old school(spent 14 years studying here).

This place never fails to shatter my notions about life. I arrived at Kanpur on 19th dec'06 only to find 12hour powercuts and a 2-3kbps connection called Reliance High-Speed Data Connection... which supposedly is some sort of improvement over dial-ups. One would think that I would be frustrated with no electricity and no internet... but I wasn't. Yes I didn't read Digg every 10 minutes, did not blog every week, did not check my mail every 5 seconds, did not watch videos online, or did not surf the 100+ channels we get on television... but it was really relaxing not to do all these things. After 1.5 years of running on the information highway, it was great to settle down for a month. This gave me ample of time to bond with people, talk at leisure with my family, make small talk with neighbors, give advice to wannabe engineers... without thinking about anything else in the back of my head. It was as if I had my garbage collection done.
To top it all, there was a reunion at my alma mater. It felt great to return to the place after 6 years and see some long forgotten faces.

I didn't do any touristy thing here. Living without a broadband internet in an old industrial city(350+ years old) was touristy enough for me.

GOA: What can I say... I spent the New Year here. It was crowded with people from all over the world. That, coupled with a warning from Al Quaeda added a few policemen to the already crowded place. The entries to the local clubs and pubs shot up by 600%, rendering them inaffordable to poor students like me. Rest assured, it was heaven... albeit a crowded one.

BANGALORE & CHENNAI: I did my engineering in Chickballapur, 50km from bangalore, so most of my friends are in Bangalore. Most of my friends from Kanpur have also relocated to this area, making it impossible for me to meet everyone of them. I ended up sending bulk mails on community websites, asking for phone numbers of people who want me to contact them. I called few of them and scheduled time slots to meet the rest of them. Unfortunately, I did not leave buffer time between the appointments so ended up saying "Hi" and "Bye" at the same time :( ... people need to be more punctual. I was in Bangalore for two days, in which I met my relatives, went to my undergraduate college to collect some papers, and met few of my friends. Trip to Chennai was relatively less stressful.. I just relaxed at my Aunt's place and spent my days there in front of her "wall mounted, 72 inch plasma display, home theater system".

All in all, my trip to India was what I wanted it to be... refreshing.

Sridhar's log... stardate 200701.01: Travel Ordeal

I am back. Its been ages since I blogged, sorted my mail, read blogs, chatted online, uploaded pictures... i.e. did anything on computer. Since the whole trip cannot be covered in totality in a single post, I'll posting multiple entries about it. This one is about my traveling experience... It is not for people with weaker hearts :P.


Although I booked my tickets a month early, I didn't look at the itinerary. I delegate work whenever possible, so assumed automatically that my agent (U.V. Travels) will plan the best itinerary for me. What happened next was a disaster:

• To India: I flew by Turkish Airlines. Without doubt, it is the most incompetent/inconvenient airlines I ever flew in and would ever fly. The in-flight entertainment systems belonged to the stone age. They had an old projector, which had three separate lights(RGB) that tried to create a pseudo color projection... it didn't go very far. The volume/channel controls were outdated and used some sort of mechanical dials.. none of them worked. Fast food was served on the plane... which was again a disaster because I am a vegetarian and my agent didn't seem to consider my food preferences while booking the tickets, but it was manageable. There was a layover in Turkey...for 14 hours!!! The hotel at the Airport has only 20 rooms, 5 reserved for the airlines... which are given to families and not single bachelors. I spent 14 hours sitting on a wooden chair/couch in a Starbucks cafe... It was more painful than it sounds. There was free wifi at the airport but no ports to plug in the power cord.
  

  
  The flight was till New Delhi, after which I had to take a connecting flight to Lucknow and then get a ride to Kanpur. At New Delhi airport, I realized that I had booked the flight for 19th jan rather than 19th December!! I took a train to Kanpur (paid another unscrupulous agent three times the fare)

• To Goa: I was supposed to fly to Bangalore, and go for a road trip to Goa with 8 other friends. The flight to Goa got canceled, had to rebook it at twice the price... small price to pay to meet priceless friends I thought. Reached Bangalore at around 7pm and had to leave for Goa at 9:00 pm. At 9:00pm I was informed that 6 of them had dropped due to some reason. Instead of 9, three of us went for the trip to Goa in a Tata Indica. We took NH 4a.. which despite being a National Highway was the worst road (no there was no road) I have ever seen... The engine cover was damaged, the axle bent and the wheel alignment destroyed. Fortunately there was a garage near the end of the road... The road trip took us over 15 hours...
  

• Back to US: Turkish Airways again... but a 19hr layover this time. Got accommodation in a lounge which made it more bearable. The flight from JFK to Syracuse got delayed by half an hour, then got delayed by another 3 hrs... and then finally got canceled. Took a bus to Syracuse and reached 6 hrs later than the estimated time.

Distance travelled:
By Air: 24000 km
By Road: 2000 km
By Rail: 2400 km

I can safely say that I traveled ALOT!!