havecarryonwilltravel

As I said previously we start booking this trip in the middle and will work to either end. We decided to arrive a few days before the Bhutan tour starts. We are going to trip about north India first. This will allow us to get over the jet lag and acclimatize to the altitude. After the Bhutan stint we are going to visit some remote Indian islands, Andaman and Nicobar.

We sit back to back, Debbie is madly searching the internet for information on what we can do in India when we arrive. Darjeeling has some potential and we will probably spend a couple of days there. Searching a few tour company sites Debbie decided to look at two more spots. Gangtok was the farthest north. It didn’t show much promise with its biggest asset being that it has embraced the 21st century and has built super roads and malls. The city is also a good spot to go if night life is what you seek. Since our city has plenty of those qualities we decide to give Gangtok a miss. The next place the tours go to is Kalimpong. It seems to have a little more to offer. There are more places of “historical significance” to visit. The folks do not seem to have a need to reach the future by ripping down their past. Hopefully there are a few sites that should be unusual to a couple of Canadians.

A couple of days in each place, a couple of days for travel and slush (the word on the internet is always leave a couple of days for slush in India) and we have an approximate arrival date.

I am busy researching the end or our trip, an excursion to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. They are pretty remote and you cannot get to them easily. We have decided on two things for sure, this part of the trip will be down time, chill and regen, and we are going to scuba dive. The island that should provide both those opportunities is Havelock. It is the island that most tourists end up on, but from what I can make it will not be ‘crowded.’ We will spend 6 days on Havelock. Now do we spend the time and travel on the Andaman Trunk Road? The road travels north on Andaman Island into remote terrain and is suppose to be quite beautiful but very rough and it is an all day ride to Diglipur. We have not decided to do that journey yet but we will come up with a decision soon.

Debbie studied Kolkata and even though it is a big city it seemed worth a couple of days. So on our way from Bhutan to the Andaman’s we will stopover and take in the sights and smells. Most big cities are similar but every country has its own signature and I’m sure Indian cities have some unique qualities.

Next step, see what is available for flights from Edmonton to Kolkata. Now we have decided to stopover going to and from India it does not matter much if we go east or west. So we picked the route with two legs of approximately equal length. Edmonton-Frankfurt and Frankfurt-Kolkata on the way there and reverse on the way home. We found dates that work and it is time to book.

We have been saving RBC Avion points for quite some time and it is time to cash in. Using points to pay for air tickets cuts down on the cost of the trip and should make back more than the yearly $120 fee I have paid over the last many years.

Debbie and I spent last evening putting together the flight numbers and time for the flights that will take us from Edmonton to Kolkata and then picking dates so that we arrived in Frankfurt, lay over for a day, then connect with the adjoining flight through to Kolkata and mirror that tactic to come home.

I phoned the Avion redemption centre and connected with an agent. She is able to string together flights that I cannot on the internet. Although I do like doing as much as I can by myself it is not always possible, so if I can figure out flight codes and times for the flights I want to take, a travel agent can actually put them together. Check the cost of this configuration of flights, the flights are often cheaper on the internet because they fly you all over the globe to get you to the destination you want. You want to make sure the ideal combination of flights is not prohibitively expensive.

The flights we planned out were not available on the exact dates we wanted and it required I make some executive decisions without Debbie’s input. You have to remember in this game there are no wrong decisions only consequences for the decisions made. I had to shorten the trip by a day on the front end thus one of our all important slush days may not exist. Oh well. The reservations were made and we’ll arrive is Kolkata, India on the appointed date.

Today I was researching meds. I use a couple of websites to see what vaccinations and what malaria prophylactics are required for where we are going; The Treehouse City Guide, http://treehouse.ofb.net, and IAMAT, http://www.iamat.org. The Alberta Health Services site will no longer allows access to destination specific information, you must book a ‘consultation’ with them to obtain the information and vaccinations you will require. Of the two I use my favorite is IAMAT, the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travellers, a Canadian not for profit organization that helps travellers. They have definitive answers on vaccinations and malaria medicines required for all countries.

Since my office medical plan pays for vaccinations as long as they are prescriptions, Debbie and I have been getting the shots we don’t have and boosters over the past year and a half. We are planning a few trips and thought we might as well get the shots now at no cost to us.

Malaria pills are something you have to get each time you go so they require a bit more trip specific research. The trick for getting the prescriptions and saving money is to avoid the ‘consultation’ fees charged by the private or provincially sponsored travel clinics . Sometimes you can get your GP to help out but they are not experts and must believe in your ability to research and decide on what is needed for your trip. This is not always clear cut as there are subjective decisions that have to be made. If you are uncomfortable making those decisions or your GP won’t help out, phone all the travel clinics in your area and find out their fee structure. The provincial clinic in Alberta will wave the ‘consultation’ fee if you have at least $48 worth of vaccinations at their clinic. This is not covered when you obtain a prescription, so if malaria meds are all you need you will have to pay a consultation and a prescription fee.

Although no vaccinations are required for India and Bhutan the literature suggests you get a variety of shots to protect you from numerous diseases, but as mentioned above Debbie and I are up to date and will not not need boosters. I think we can get malaria pills from our GP, at least we are going to try, it will save us $48 per traveller clinic fee and a $15 prescription fee. We will try to get these soon, as my medical plan is about to run out.

I spent part of today trying to sort out the long flights from Edmonton to Kolkata. The internet can be frustrating. I know there are flights that leave here at decent times, with good connections and, with a minimum of hassle, arrive at the place I want to go. Using the airline websites do not allow me to put the flights together in the combinations I want. I enter a starting point and the name of the place I want to end up at and the airline computers put together the strangest combination of connections. Why would I want to fly Edmonton-Denver, Denver-Moscow, Moscow-Singapore, Singapore-Kolkata? I would travel 25,000 km. to a destination that by the great circle is 10,000 km. The airlines want to send me all over the globe and then have the audacity to ask me if I would like to contribute some of my Aeroplan miles towards carbon credits???? I’m quite sure this does not make much sense.

Next I find that even though the distance from Edmonton to Kolkata is shorter flying west, the only flights I can find on our national airline website fly east through Europe. There are Star Alliance partners that do fly west, I just cannot find a ticket to fly that direction on the internet. Not such a big deal but flying east adds 4 or 5 hours in transit to an already long day.

I think I have come up with an idea that will help with the long flight.  Since we no longer have any time constraints we will just book the flight with a one day layover at about the half way point. If we fly through Frankfurt we will spend a night each way in Germany and regen. In the next couple of days I’ll try it again and we will try to settle on a route and fix a couple of dates.

Debbie and I have a bucket list, or at least a short list, of where we want to go in the next few years. Ever since we read that Bhutan calculates its wealth on the Gross National Happiness Quota and not the GDP we have thought it would be a good place to see. Although after finding out there is a minimum daily expenditure required of all tourists, I think that the almighty dollar has taken on a little more importance than the Bhutan folks like to admit.

My retirement will now allow us the ability to travel on the shoulder seasons and about 6 months ago we started to discuss where our next destination should be. We shortlisted a trip to Peru and Bolivia, a bike trip to Spain and a trip to Bhutan. After a month or two of deliberation we both decided upon Bhutan on the same day (serendipity). Our thought; the number of tourists allowed to enter and the daily enforced spending amount will both increase in 2012 and if we do not go this year we will not go at all.

Bhutan does not allow independent travel. You must be on a tour. The tour can consist of two people but you must have a guide and driver and, and, and. Debbie and I discovered a few years ago, on a trip to the Tour de France, we are not exactly tour people. We were black sheep and often wanted to stray from the outlined itinerary, much to the chagrin of the tour operator. So the idea of another tour didn’t exactly appeal to us, but we have to suck it up or Bhutan is a no go.

After we decided to go, I spent several days on the internet bookmarking Bhutan sites. I included official sites from the government, sites from bloggers who have been there, general interest sites and sites of tour operators that looked of interest.  The next task was to short list 4 or 5 tour operators with tours that would suit us. The length of the tour, the cost, the number of people on the tour, the places it goes and activities to take part in were all considered in compiling the list. We use this type of list and process for every trip we go on, sometimes for dive operators, sometimes for accommodation, whatever requires pre-planning and pre-trip booking. We then make up a list of questions we can email to the 5 groups on the list. We want to find out which trip will be the best experience for us. We also get an idea of the tour company’s personality; are the folks happy and how willing are they to accommodate our particular needs and whims? For instance, Debbie and I are not sticklers for detail but we do enjoy a group that has fun and loves what they do. So we try to gather in from the info collected if the crew is a happy go lucky lot. Once we narrow it down to a couple of groups we will often phone with another set of questions just to make voice contact. Emails can paint a very different picture from reality but the human voice is often very telling and it is good to have the second perspective.

In the mean time we had determined that we are not going to fly halfway around the world and spend 10 days in Bhutan just to get on the plane and come home. All that time and money invested we might as well explore a little. I was talking to a young fellow at work and asked if he had been to India, he screwed up his face and said he had traveled to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, not what most people consider India but part of the country none the less. He indicated that the islands were quite close to Thailand. He described a place with not too many residents, not too many tourists and really a bit of an undiscovered gem. The bells in my head went off and I started to research Andaman and Nicobar as an extension to our Bhutan trip. I found scuba diving there and it was a slam dunk. Just the kind of place Debbie and I like to spend our time exploring.

That bucket list I mentioned earlier also includes a long trip to India. On my list of places to visit in India is Darjeeling. Lo and behold if Darjeeling isn’t just a few miles west of Bhutan. We have a trip.

We sat down and sketched out a couple of itineraries that we could do. Considered were several issues including but not limited to; the length of the trip to that side of the world and how best to readjust to the time change, the altitude of Bhutan (Debbie had trouble in Tibet last year) and how to acclimatize, the flow of the trip (wanted to end the trip with chill time on the beach), and the ease of connections for required transportation.

From here we looked at what order to book things. There is no use having all the flights booked if the tour we thought we might like to go on is all booked up, or booking the tour just to find there are no flights to or from Bhutan on the dates we require. We thought the most critical part was the Bhutan tour dates so we started in the middle and are in the process of booking forwards and backwards in time.

After quite a few emails and a couple of phone calls to Wind Horse Tours, we decided they had the tour that best suited us. There is a maximum of seven people per group, the trip is 12 days long, it includes attendance at 2 autumn festivals (colorful and energetic undertakings), and several short hikes, enough to get us out of the car, a most confining space. Shortly after confirming our spaces with Wild Horse we were on the computer booking flights on Druk Air, the only airlines to have access to Bhutan. We have to enter and leave Bhutan on certain days so these flights are critical.

Over the next few weeks we will be piecing together the rest of the trip and I will try to update on semi regular basis. It is funny how Debbie and I start out without much of a plan and mostly due to the constraints of the transportation required, by the time we leave, our schedule is fairly tight. I once heard it said that, it is not the destination but the journey that matters, and the planning and scheduling of our trip is all part of the journey for us.

happy trails for now