And the trip begins....

First destination - Amritsar



Flew to Delhi from Mumbai a night before and boarded a early morning train - Shatabdi to Amritsar. It starts at 7.30 am and reaches Amritsar by 1.30 pm.



Few clicks from the train-

I was so looking forward to this 2 day trip to Amritsar...one of the many reasons was to meet @pbkulkarni . He was to join us for the trip up till Rishikesh. But a bad luck he missed the train by just 15 minutes and there I could see a lot of plans being canceled and hoping the trip moves on as planned. We even had a awesome lunch which @realin  got for us at Ludhiana station :) Yummy it was - Amritsari parathas :p  Oh and it was such a pleasure meeting him and his wife after knowing him for so long :)

Not that we had great plans..as the train was to reach in noon so we planned to visit the famous Wagha border that evening and later in the night visit Golden Temple.


The hotel we choose was a walking distance from the Temple. We stayed in Hotel City Heart Amritsar - www.hotelcityheartamritsar.com  and an hour and a half drive to border.


A very decent, simple, clean and non expensive stay it was. We checked in and freshened up and were ready to leave for Wagha border.


What can I say about this place... less said the better...maybe I would just let the pictures do the talking:

Escape Aspired ............ !

Been long that I had been planning for a holiday and finally made it.

The most difficult thing to plan is where to go...not so easy to pick a place. Being a Club Mahindra member I know I need to plan much in advance. Last minute trips are kinda difficult with them. So there I started to plan a little differently this time.

Since a while I had the urge to visit Golden Temple and thats when it struck me why not plan going there. Weather would be awesome and a beautiful place to visit and feel blessed.

While I was planning up for that a thought came to my mind, now that I am going up so far already why not add a few more places to the trip..so eventually a trip for just 3 days landed up being for 9 days :-)

It was so much fun planning for this trip, as I saw to it that I do have a few train travels, as its been like years I would have traveled long distance in train. A few things I kept in mind while I picked the places to visit were :

Spiritual
Train travel
Adventure Sport
Camping
Scenic
No mobile connectivity (at least for a day)

And believe me..I got it all :) 

Spiritual - Golden Temple and Haridwar
Train Travel - Did 3 long distance train journey
Adventure Sport - Managed to do River Rafting
Camping - Jawarna Near Dhanulti
Scenic - All the places
No mobile connectivity - Yes managed in Jawarna while camping ( no connectivity for 24 hours)

Not getting much in to detail here is my trip itinerary -

Started my trip on Dec 2 - Flew in to Delhi
Dec 3  - Took a morning Shatabdi train to Amritsar (arrived at 2 pm)- Spent the day in Amritsar
Dec 4 - Late night train to Haridwar ( arrived at 8 am ) - Spent the day in Amritsar
Dec 5 & 6 - Haridwar & Rishikesh
Dec 6 - Evening left for a small hill station called Chamba in a car we hired (2 hours drive from Rishikesh)
Dec 7 -  Left in noon for Jawarna which is near Dhanulti (2 hours drive from Chamba)
Dec 8 - Left in noon for Mussoorie. (1 hour drive from Jawarna)
Dec 9 - Left in noon for Dehradhun (  1 hour drive from Mussoorie) & boarded a late night train to Delhi
Dec 10  - Arrived Delhi at morning 6 am. Day well spent in Delhi and trip ends with a late night flight back home

And the trip ends :(

Well next few posts am gonna write about each place I have been and all the things I did :-)

Stay glued :D

Coorg - Through My Eyes...

Quite a lot can be said about this beautiful, quite and a calm place. We took off from Mumbai to Bangalore via an early morning flight. As we were going to stay in the Club Mahindra Kodagu Valley, Coorg property, we had our taxi pre booked from them. It was a nice and beautiful drive all the way to Coorg. It would have been an approx of 280 odd kms. But the entire 4 hours of drive was fabulous and the rains made it more fantastic.

The Mahindra resort was so welcoming. Located amongst luscious greens. We were gonna be there for about 4 days. We reached around noon...had a fantastic lunch in one of their open air restaurants.

We then checked in to our room...had taken their 1bhk room. It was just great..especially the back view from the room was wonderful.

The pic above is what we had right from our room there...the walk in these greens was wonderful. The day was well spent in the resort. A few glimpses of their resort...

The next morning we were welcomed with nice rains and temperature was down to just 14 Degc. We then had planned to visit the very famous Talacauvery which is around 50 kms from the resort. It is the original source of Cauvery river and is located in the Bhramhagiri hill at 1200m aprx above the sea level. It is believed that taking bath in Talacauvery is very sacred and can relieve the man from all the sufferings.   

There is a small hill which once walked up had amazing view..actually breathtaking..

    

We had a wonderful day out there...got back to the resort and let the day end. The next day we had something very exciting for us to look forward to. It was a trip to Dubarey Elephant camp. A place where we can give bath, scrub and feed elephants. An amazing experience with the elephants which I have never had as yet. 

 

  

I had a wonderful experience out there and thanks to the team of Club Mahindra to make it more memorable. The next day was another different kind of experience which again I had for the 1st time. We were headed to a Tibetan Monastery - Golden Temple. It houses over 250 monks as on date.

Stepping inside the temple feels like walking in to another world altogether. There are three beautiful golden Buddha statues each of 40 feet namely Padmasambhava, Buddha and Amityaus look down at visitors above the altar. 

                  

An absolutely stunning place. A place where I would feel like going back again and again. With a visit to this place our trip was almost at end. The next day we had a flight back home from Bangalore...The trip was wonderful and more over the Club Mahindra has a fantastic resort out there..

A must must visit for all...