Rajasthan Trip 2015 - Feb 4th to 15th: Overview

After a long wait, our family finally went on a round trip to the most exciting location within India: Rajasthan! As readers would know, Rajasthan is known for its abiding culture, its colourful, rich heritage, and its palaces and forts. In fact, most tourists from within India and abroad rate Rajasthan as the no. 1 state in terms of the pleasure and excitement it offers to all classes of tourists (barring beach enthusiasts). The main attractions of this state are:

1. It has many historical places dating back to the first millennium A.C.E. 
2. The historically rich heritage consists of everything from places, palaces, forts, clothing, culture, food and grooming to cosmetics, decor, traditions and their use of camels in the desert areas for a wide variety of actions. Certainly, without all these things, Rajasthan would have nothing great to offer to tourists. There is but one hill-station (Mt. Abu), no beaches, no mountains, no large rivers, not much in the way of adventure sports, and so on. 
3. It has many wild-life reserves and sanctuaries. Its much celebrated spots include the Ranthambore Tiger Park and the Keoladeo Wildlife Reserve (better known as the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary). 
4. Being mainly a Hindu-religion area, it has a major Muslim religious place, viz. Ajmer, visited by Muslims and even more non-Muslims, as it has a "dargah" of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz (Moinuddin Chishti).

We booked our own flights - onward to Jaipur with Go Air, and return via Ahmedabad with Jet Konnect. We then booked the entire journey and hotels with M/s Creative Holidays India, with whom we have earlier done Egypt as well as Sikkim. The point person there was a certain Bhumika Jain, who is a pleasant-mannered girl who coordinated with me as well as with the others in the family to give us a memorable holiday. When I requested her team to give me something special, she arranged to upgrade our stay at many of the places, esp. Jaipur, Jaisalmer and even Udaipur (although a few places weren't so great, but more of that later.)

We left Mumbai on the early morning of the 4th, and returned in the evening of the 15th of February 2015. The next several posts will describe the holiday in more detail. 

Thank you for visiting. Read the next installment HERE.