I've been home from India for thirteen months. It was about time to get organized and get to work on photos. Over the summer I completed a book about the three treks we had taken while on our expat assignment. For some reason chronicling those trips seemed like a more controlled experiment. The next planned volume was all of our domestic travel within India. It involved sifting through thousands of photos (which I had neglected to keep well organized) from nineteen different trips, recreating a 400 - 500 word summary of each of those trips that wasn't just a recitation of what we did, and organizing it into 332 pages.
A few things I realized while putting this book together:
A few things I realized while putting this book together:
- Neemrana may be one of my favorite places in the world. For anyone travelling to India that has an extra day, I'd highly recommend making the stop halfway between Delhi and Jaipur. It's a fantastic fort palace that they continue to renovate and makes a great one night getawway from Delhi. We discovered it for the first time in 2004. In total, we've returned five times since.
- Eleven of our 19 trips were to the state of Rajasthan, including multiple trips to the aforementioned Neemrana, Jodhpur, and Udaipur. While I really enjoy looking at the photographs from Jaipur, it remains one of my least favorite places in India; extremely touristy and, personally, I think it's a shame that it's the only Rajasthani city many travellers to India visit as part of the golden triangle along with Delhi and Agra.
- We stayed in some ridiculously nice hotels in India. Nicer hotels than we'll probably stay in for the rest of our lives (though having the ability to travel at the tail end of an off season, or in the case of Udaipur in late May right smack dab in the middle of off season, certainly helped make those places more affordable).
- There were a number of strangers we decided to trust along the way. I love having pictures of those (former) strangers - they bring back stronger memories than simply looking at a picture of the Taj Mahal.
- As a general statement, I have incredible family and friends. More specifically, I appreciate having had so many of them visit us (and allow me to direct their travel schedules to my own benefit) and having so many familiar faces sprinkled throughout our travels and the book.
While I'm pretty sure there's only a handful of people that will take the time to look at the book and even fewer that will read and look at the entire book (admittedly, I'm not sure how excited I'd be to look through over 300 pages of someone else's vacations), here are the links to the book in all its glory:
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