[13.12.2009] On day one of our trip to Hyderabad we slept until lunch time and then set off in our taxi to try to see the Golconda Fort. After just a couple of minutes in the car it started to rain and as we drove it got steadily worse. Since we were hoping to go to a sound and light show in a ruined fort, it soon became apparent that going there probably wasn’t the cleverest idea I'd ever had. Remembering my quick scan of the tour guides that morning, I took a decision to cancel or postpone the fort and I asked the driver if he could take us to the Salar Jung museum instead. It was the only place I could [di più]

[13.12.2009] If you had asked me to name one famous thing associated with Hyderabad before we went there it have been the Charminar. It must be on every website and on the cover of every map or guidebook of the city ever printed. It's a fascinating looking building that might not quite have the lure of the Taj Mahal or India's great palaces but it pricked my imagination. If you'd asked for two famous things, the second would have been Biryani, the rice-based dish for which the city is famed but the Charminar would have been a long way ahead of the biryani. There's something about the buttery-yellow buildin [di più]

[13.12.2009] The Birla Mandir - or Birla Temple - in Hyderabad was the second of the Birla Mandirs that I have visited, the other being in Jaipur. I visited that first one on Christmas Day 1996 during the first of my visits to India. Aside from being so white that it almost glowed in the moonlight and floodlighting, not too much of the visit stuck in my mind except the tale we were told that it had been built by a famous rich man and his family. I didn't give it a lot more thought until recently. Between that first visit to India and our recent visit to Hyderabad I'd come across the Birla family name ma [di più]

[13.12.2009] We arrived at the Birla Science Museum fresh from visiting the Birla Mandir temple nearby. It was about 10 am and the place was still closed so we parked up and bought soft drinks from the food stand inside the gates whilst I driver wandered off to get some tea with the other taxi drivers. We couldn't get in until 10.30 and whilst we waited a small army of neatly dressed primary school children marched up, two abreast to wait with us. The teachers were going crazy trying to control them and you could sense to excitement amongst the little ones. We wondered why they would be so excited about a [di più]

[03.12.2009] It's never a great experience to land at a new airport at 4.45 am so our recent visit to Hyderabad found us tired, a bit confused and not entirely sure what to expect. I knew only a couple of things about the airport: that it was very new, that it was a LONG way from the city and that I was likely to get ripped off for a taxi. I was also aware that if we got hot and bothered and looked at all like we might have swine flu, we weren't going to get let into the country. So no pressure then! Due to having nabbed seats that were fairly near the front of the economy cabin, we were able to get off [di più]

[16.09.2009] My husband and I stayed at the Radission Chennai for a few days whilst I was working at my employer's local office in the St Thomas Mount area of the city. My husband had come along because we were going to start a 2 week tour of the south of India a few days later. This hotel was the one that the company always chose for international visitors because the cost was not too shocking and the facilities were of a really good standard and, of course in a country where even short distances can take a long time to travel at peak times, the location was convenient for the office. Some of my colleague [di più]

[08.09.2009] My first trip to India included a lot of really lousy hotels. We had places where the electrical sockets in the bathroom were directly under the shower head and my room mate had tripped out the power supply in half the places we stayed with her hair dryer. We'd learned to recognise a wide range of insects infesting some of the rooms and had eaten some strange food served in odd ways by waiters whose waistcoats could have been boiled up to make soup. So nothing really prepared us for a little bit of luxury. When our rickety and very dirty bus pulled up outside the Chandella in Khajaraho we were [di più]

[07.09.2009] It was Christmas Day 1995 and my first trip to India. I woke up with an overwhelming sense of well-being and an absolute buzz of excitement that I was really somewhere different. I was at Sariska Palace Hotel, a giant pinky-white wedding cake of a building next to a wildlife park and I was absolutely loving it. It was the beginning of my long and expensive love affair with India. My first experience of an Indian hotel was pretty lousy - a run down giant of a hotel in Delhi that smelled so badly of damp that my clothes picked up the smell and held on to it for a week or so after. But Sariska [di più]

[21.08.2009] I've never really been a beach-lover. Admittedly my long-held ambition to one day retire by the sea with a couple of dogs could suggest otherwise, but that's not about loving beaches, it's about loving the sea. I can't abide all that sand in your food, hair, clothes and baggage. And parading my gravity-battered flesh for the derision of strangers is no picnic either. So if someone says 'Do you want to go to the beach?' they'll do well to get more than a grudging grunt from me. One place where I found my kind of beach was in Chennai in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Before going to the south of [di più]

[16.06.2009] I love Delhi and nothing gives me more pleasure than to stay a few days in this fabulous city where I never seem to run out of things to do. The only problem is that finding affordable hotels can be a complete nightmare. A few years ago I discovered the secret to getting a bargain on a good hotel in Delhi. It's very simple; you have to go at the peak of the summer when nobody else wants to be there. Suddenly when the temperature shoots up and the monsoon is about to arrive and nobody with half a brain would choose to be in Delhi, THEN you really can get a bargain. On this particular trip w [di più]