Ikben.in travelblog

Yup, just a bit more than 70 hours remaining before I start my new internship in Oslo!

Can’t wait .

A week-and-a-half ago I went for a short 3-day trip to Mumbai (Bombay), 996 kilometers from Bangalore. I went by bus since the travel company promised me that this was drivable in about 16 hours, which was true on the way going, the train takes 24 hours to get there, so then rather bus.

The bus going to Mumbai was actually quite comfy. I slept most of the way going there. The problems started to arise once I entered Mumbai. I hadn’t booked a hotel beforehand, I was just planning to find something while I was there.

I found a taxi driver that showed me a guesthouse which was way to expensive for what it offered. 500 a night for a 170×60 bed without AC and next to the elevator. So I went on. I needed to find a city map first and that took about an hour to find. Since the taxi driver seemed also not to familiar with the area of the city where I was. The taxi driver offered to bring me to a place somewhere else in the city and since I didn’t know anything I agreed.

He took me to somewhere where there was absolutely nothing. So I asked for some help on the street and was guided to a travel agency nearby. The travel agency pointed out a nearby hotel. This hotel looked quite nice. It was just that it was situate at the end of a runway of Mumbai International Airport. The normal price for the hotel was Rs. 3000 for a night but in the end I payed Rs. 1320 per night!

The hotel was nicely situated in the centre of the city (not the citycenter). So I could go everywhere easily by local train (which the Lonely Planet says you should not take). I took the local trains everywhere . Rs. 9 for 30 kilometers by train!

The first day I just had some dinner and walked through the slums in the neighborhood (while it was dark). Slums in Mumbai are not that bad in some area’s actually. To me it looked more a lifestyle for some people. Even Ikea in Europe shows that you can live with 3 people on 30m2 and if you can afford a Nokia N96 then it looks to me that you can also try to get into a normal rental flat (which are built like crazy in Mumbai at the moment).

The second day I went to the citycenter to check the attacked Taj out and walk around a bit. In this area you can really see the difference between a place that has always been big and a place like Bangalore which has only gotten big over the last 20 years. There is absolutely no cultural heritage in Bangalore, in Mumbai there are still all kinds of Victorian age buildings, very nice!

This day also showed the facade of it all. There is a new pretty expensive mall built in an old factory some distance from the citycenter. The mall itself looks really good. But once you’re outside and look up you can see the really old slum-like flats standing on top.

The next day I went to the Borivali district to check out where my bus would leave from and to visit the national park (not found and disappointing respectively). After that I went to Juhu Beach, the 5-star resort beach of Mumbai. Where an auto-repairshop (for autorickshaws) is called ‘Milan auto repair’ and a high school is called ‘Billabong High’ (Surfgear included? ). It is rather posh there, but it still looks like India with garbage everywhere.

The next day it was already time to go again. This time I had another bus company: VRL/Vijayanand and this company is terrible. What took 17 hours on the way coming to Mumbai took me 21 hours now. They were stopping everywhere, terrible. I can highly recommend Sharma Transports .

Another trip which I survived!

Last week was the time for a new trip again. This time to Mysore, Ooty & Connoor I did it all by myself, so that was pretty exciting .

To start summing the trip up: it was a lot of waiting and mandatory shopping for the commission for the guides and drivers. The bus was supposed to leave at 7:30 on Wednesday morning. When we actually did leave it was 10. So it started good with a two-and-a-half hour delay. On the way to Mysore we stopped by a temple where a lot of explanation was given, the only problem was that it was in Hindi (I was the only foreigner on the trip).

The kid in front of me in the bus to Mysore

Mysore itself was quite nice. We saw the palace and a temple up on the mountain. Nothing too special though, but nice to see once.
The hotel I stayed at in Mysore was quite nice. Even the single room had a double bed and I had a TV! That all for only Rs.150 (E. 2,25). The only problem was that the promised hot water was not there…

The next day (Christmas) we went on to Ooty. A hill station in Tamil Nadu which lies some 3 km above sea level. I was warned before that it would be quite cold in the mountains, so I bought a winter jacket beforehand. That was not really an unnecessary luxury.
In Ooty we visited a really nice botanical garden (which was the only nice thing that day) with terraces and all. It was quite a big garden.

The map of India in plants

The hotel in Ooty was amazing. I really felt a bit like at home. It was pretty cold and there were no heaters in the rooms but only a big woolen blanket. I loved it (it is nice if you come from the Netherlands to have at least a freezing Christmas)

The white on the top of the car is actual ice!

In the morning we were leaving for Connoor. A hill station just 18 km away from Ooty. This was another big test of patience. The bus left an hour-and-a-half late again. Really annoying.
Connoor itself had some nice views. But I like Munnar in Kerala still a lot better. I bought some chocolate tea in Connoor. Nice for back in NL!

View on a hill

When we got back to Ooty to take the bus back to Bangalore there was another hold-up. We were supposed to leave at 18:00 and at around 20:00 we called to the travel agent and he said that one of his busses had broken down and that it would take some extra time to get everybody a spot in the bus. The original plan was to be back in Bangalore at five and we were there now at six because we could step over in 3 minutes in Mysore. So in the end it was not that bad .

A good end to yet another trip. From Jan. 2nd onwards I’ll do my last trip in India probably: 3 days to Mumbai!

All pictures can off course be found at ikben.in/pics

Well, it has been some exciting weeks.

Firstly I went to Hampi (again…) with the Dutch students after spending some time during the week with them.

This time I rented a bicycle in Hampi and cycled around the village to the places I missed last time. So almost everything I saw there this time was still new! The best thing this time were the waterfalls. They were somewhere in the middle of nowhere and I think they were still under water when I went to Hampi the last time.
The waterfalls itself did not have that much water. It was more of a stone foundation that was completely eroded by every years monsoon waters.

My rented bike and some kids in Hampi

After coming back from Hampi I started participating in the MyChoice! Bangalore project. That was a project for schoolchildren between 12 and 16 to teach them about sustainability. Wouter and me were in the newspaper for that (I mirrored it here CLICK (Copyright Times of India)) It was in the Bangalore Times edition, which has a daily print of one million copies! I had a lot of fun doing this project and giving back something to the community!

On a Sunday there was a trip to the Hassan district in Karnataka state. A district with a lot of temples and religious relevance for Hindu people. We visited three temples in one day. One of them was on a mountain. So we had to climb up some 600 steps. But it was nice. we had a Volvo bus (air suspension!) and it was really to comfy for us. The speed bumps were hardly noticeable.
Out of the 10 hours in the bus I slept at least 7. So that was good .

Our Volvo bus!

The last two weeks were a little boring, I didn’t do a lot of things. There were only some plans made about what to do with Christmas and new-years.
I made a plan to go to Dubai, since I was invited by the brother of my landlord, but unfortunately that plan fell through. The other plans were to go to Chennai, to the north of India or a 5-day trip throughout the state.
The plan changed again however and the plan is now:
This week (Christmas) a 3-day trip to Mysore, Ooty and Connoor and next week (Jan. 2nd to Jan. 6th) a trip to Mumbai by bus! (16-18 hrs in bus).

The local fruit merchant in my neighbourhood in Bangalore

Going on the relatively cheap trips with the holidays saves some money to go somewhere else later in the year. I’m going to FOSDEM in Brussels in the beginning of Feb. and might be going to CeBIT in Hannover in March. Since the plane tickets to New York are only 350 Euro from Brussels at the moment I might also do that in April for the holidays!

The Pics folder has also been updated obviously and can still be found @ ikben.in/pics

And then the holiday came: We asked our managers if we were allowed some days off to go on a ‘business trip’ to the Singapore office. Which would be good for our projects at the company. There was no objection, so we started planning the trip!

The first thing is obviously getting the plane tickets. Flying from Bangalore to Singapore (that rhymes) is really cheap because of all those managers flying around. There are 10-15 planes a day that go to Singapore. Since we went low-budget with Tiger Airways it was only Rs.10000 per person round-trip for a 4.5-hour destination.

When we arrived in Singapore we first had to get to our hotel. A hotel in the red light district of Singapore, since that was the cheapest option available. I forgot to print a Google Maps overview of where the hotel would be. So we first went to Raffles Place, which is the central financial district of Singapore. It was Saturday, so almost everything there was closed. But we found a small food-mall kind of thing and since we are used to eating (on the streets) in India already we can eat everything in Singapore, no matter where we buy it. The breakfast for this first day was some prawn soup (@ 08:00 o’clock).

We asked some people where to hotel would be and they guided us to a bus. The comfort level in the buses was amazing (compared to India), air suspension and no speed bumps. Finding the hotel we dropped of our luggage and took a bus towards the city center. There we walked around a bit and saw the ‘Singapore Flyer’, a giant Ferris Wheel with a good overview of the city. We went on that and saw all the ships that are waiting in front of the country to enter the port, and some of the nice sky scrapers and housing projects.

In the evening we went to Little India which is actually quite a lot like India, all the traffic lights are removed, since they won’t work there anyway, and you can eat proper Indian food. It was Diwali weekend, so there were a lot of people on the streets to celebrate.

The next days were just checking out the city: go to Sentosa, the artificial island built for entertainment purposes and visit Chinatown to get some electronics (bought a DS there).

On Monday evening we left for Kuala Lumpur-Malaysia. We took the night train, which is actually worse than the night trains in India. The even left the lights on all-night! Arriving in Kuala Lumpur you immediately notice the difference. KL looks a lot cheaper and dirtier than Singapore.

We did not book a hotel in Kuala Lumpur yet. So we needed to find one. We were guided towards the ‘Tune Hotel’ which is a low-budget chain where you can get everything separately. You only get a bed and a shower and things like A/C and towels you need to pay for additionally. Including A/C and towels it was still very cheap though.

We went to ‘Bukit Bintang’ next. That is the central shopping district of Kuala Lumpur. They have a mall there that has all sorts of Japanese ‘Shibuya’ imports for not a lot of money. So over the next days we bought a lot of clothes and things there.

We also went to see the Petronas Towers obviously. There were no tickets left to go up. So we went to the basement mall, which has all the expensive stores. There it suddenly stuck me: ‘I’ve seen too many Louis Vuitton stores over the last week already, it is nothing special.’ That was also one of the reasons we went to the malls in Bukit Bintang. There they had at least some special stuff that is hard to find in Europe.

The next day we went to the beach because Wouter wanted a beach day. We went to Port Dickson, two hours from Kuala Lumpur. It looked like a place that had gone out-of-fashion. Half-built hotels and general misery. The people there were also not very nice. That was one of the reasons I got a bit homesick there, not for the Netherlands, but for India. The beach itself was good, they had some attractions and things you could rent.

The next day we went back to KL for some final shopping and to get ready for the train journey back to Singapore. This time they did turn off the lights in the train, but the A/C in our compartment got broken. It had frozen over. So they could only start it up after we left KL for more than an hour already. This was not comfortable, since the Malaysia/Singapore climate is 30 degrees Celsius with 95-100% humidity. It is a bit like really hot summers in the Netherlands.

Back in Singapore we did not a lot anymore. We visited the Night Safari, which is a part of the Singapore Zoo which is only opened during the evening and only has night animals, and we visited the bird park. A park with 8000 birds, so it is quite big.

The last evening we went to Chinatown again and I got myself a new mobile! It is a Philips one . and this concludes the Singapore-Malaysia trip. The shopping harvest was the following:
- 1 Nintendo DS
- 1 Mobile Phone (Philips 9@9q)
- 1 pair of jeans
- 2 shorts
- 7 shirts
- 2 bags
- 1 tie

Singapore pics @ pics/2008-10-25-singapore
Malaysia pics @ pics/2008-10-28-malaysia