DesiTraveller

  Breakfast buffets at Indian hotels are probably the best means of sorting out what the F&B experience will be like at their other restaurants. Unlike with hotels in many countries abroad, the Indian breakfast buffet is usually largely vegetarian, with an egg and dosa counter, as well as a token display of cold cuts and sausages. Marked, usually, with an absence of pork. What are the points to look out for with a breakfast buffet in India? 1) Go for the pre-boiled eggs. Crack one open. The rest of the egg adventures will depend on the colour of the yolk inside and how fresh the egg tastes. If the boiled eggs served are lousy, then the rest of the breakfast is also, probably, a collection of lowest bids. 2) Check out the idlis. If they are fresh-steamed, plus points, but if they are lying sadly neglected in some sort of serving apparatus, then once again you realise that the typical Indian star hotel truly has not learnt anything from the many Indian vegetarian restaurants on t...

  This is probably the first and most important question that needs an answer, documented in writing, before even thinking of making a reservation. The second question which I am adding after an experience at a property owned by one of India's biggest hotel chains is - do you have silent generators or what? We are on a bit of a West Coast of India drive as I type this. Highways are mostly brilliant, except ghat sections which have borne the brunt of higher traffic and stronger monsoons, and toll booths which are a disgrace to everything we stand for in India in context with cleanliness and good behaviour. Toll booths will be a separate article, post, essay - on how the typical behaviour especially towards those without FasTags continues to be that of extortion based collections.  Almost all hotels in India make a sizeable part of their revenue out of functions of all sorts. From early morning through till pre-dawn, and so be it, which is probably why room rates and breakfast a...

Simple fact - in context with tourists from any country in the world - very few, if any, will admit to having been made a monkey of on an expensive trip to another country. This is a universal truth, and the reasons are not far to see - most do not know anything about the destination unless they have really researched the destination. In our context, whether inbound or outbound India, especially after paying out big fat visa fees. And if they have researched the destination well, then they will certainly have steered clear of all the relevant tourist traps, something many of us learnt early in life. For example, take coastal beach tourist towns anywhere in the world, and start from the restaurants which are right on the beach. Broadly, these can be defined as "greedy row", where everything is over-charged or watered-down or both. On the second street from the beach-front are usually the back-ends of the restaurants on the beach-facing row. Prices may be lower, but then also b...

  Destination weddings, or destination functions of any sort, are amongst the biggest evolutions of package tours without the tours. In most cases they comprise of taking a flight plus some other form of transport to a resort or a hotel, attending expensive choreographed functions, and then returning back to base. Getting wasted appears to be, often, one of the core objectives. Trying to imitate a random Hindi movie is another aspirational here. In almost all cases, all that this achieves is travel inside another tube, and food that tastes the same. In addition, your budget is likely to go totally out of shape on basics like drinking water and airport food, because those are not cheap. I have done a few destination weddings, in addition we also live in a second home sometimes in an Indian city which has a lot of destination weddings, so there is a wee bit of experience involved too. Destination weddings abroad are something else again. Here I try to tell readers how a good quality ...

  Contrary to most supercilious, patronising and condescending write-ups on domestic travel in India that many of us may have seen, I have yet to suffer a bad stomach due to food when on the road or in the trains, but then again there are simple basics to follow. Anywhere in the world, incidentally, and not just in India. I love meat. But Number 1 on my no-go list when travelling is meat. Non-vegetarian food, especially mince meat in any form, and especially highly spiced curries and kababs based on mystery meats, are by their very nature, suspect, globally, unless you see the meat with the bone attached prancing or swimming in front of you, or nearby. Anything that has been in transit, cold chain or not, and then stored, has a reasonable chance of being tainted.  I do not say this lightly - storing of food in freezers was amongst the most serious and important cross-domain functions going on ships. The engineers needed to ensure that the fridge rooms (all four or more) functi...

The traveler who has eyes to see occupies a world as fresh as the first day and just full of wonders.   Simple fact - there are many more Warrior Queens in India, not just the Rani of Jhansi, who took on the Mughal invaders and European Colonials that I did not know about till I got moving on budget travel all over India. The simple reason for this was that almost all of them hailed from smaller towns and cities in India when compared to the Metro Cities and barring a few, were simply not there in the larger public mindspace. So there I was, on my way by road from Pune to Belagavi (Belgaum) to Bengaluru. Every which way, one of the explanations for its name was and is "Village of Bamboos", and that's what got stuck in my mind. In addition to the fact that it is the Maratha Light Infantry Regimental Training Centre as well as the location for the Commando Training Centre - both of which are well worth the visit too.  Belagavi is one of those newer tourist destinations, whi...

  Online reviews of hotels, as found on a variety of travel and aggregator websites, are chancy at best and outright shaky at worst. By the way, this is global, so not India specific.  So what do you do if you are travelling on a budget and leaving hotel bookings for the end, like we often do, or have opted to travel suddenly? 1) Book a room for only one night. Extend if you like the place, otherwise go walkabout in the same town, and choose something else. We also very often sit in the lobby whilst one of us goes and checks the rooms on offer. Select what you like, not what they offer. 2) Call up the property before making a booking. Very often, the response and quality of answers, will tell you a lot more than the reviews put up online. And in this context, owner operated properties are often a better bet. 3) Use a credit card to make a booking. Specifically credit cards can give you the rights to ask for a reversal of charges towards  delinquency  in services rend...