We decided to spend the day today in the room. I went for a run upstairs, my first 7.5km run probably since arriving here, which left me drenched in my own sweat - and hungry. So after showers we went down and had the breakfast buffet and stayed down for breakfast while perusing the news for about an hour.
Afterwards we returned to the room and decided to spend the afternoon booking our onwards journey. Trains in this country are really tricky to book for two reasons: 1) Availability; AC1 (first class) and AC2 are really quickly booked up and with only limited capacity and 2) the IRCTC Indian online system really sucks and is so temperamental that every time you click the Book button on either ClearTrip or MakeMyTrip you wait with fingers crossed and bated breath, praying to the powers that be that this will not be yet another incident where payment is taken (but ultimately refunded to the credit card in a matter of a couple of days) but you're left we a failed booking of trains&seats, which has happened probably during 25% of our bookings.
Anyway, after much planning, staring a maps and to'ing and fro'ing we managed to book the transport side of things for the rest of our trip, which from Darjeeling includes: flights from Bagdogra to Amritsar via Delhi (3h10m stopover, Jet Air, which we've used before - 2 nights there), train from Amritsar to Lucknow (1 night in a Taj), train from Lucknow to Jaipur (2 nights), train from Jaipur to Mount Abu (Abu Road - 5 nights), train from Abu Road to Jodhpur (3 nights), train from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer (3 nights) and finally train from Jaisalmer to Delhi (5 nights). We also managed to book accommodation on the way until Jodhpur - so we still got Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and finally New Delhi to book in terms of accommodation.
After this, our brains were fried (remember, that planning involves making decisions on what we want to see - and discussions of what we are going to have to miss, which is really painful, given that some of the decisions have to be taken based on how far off the route it is, whether it's in bandit country (read: Bihar;-) and how bothered we are - the "missed sights" list includes Varanassi/Ganges river although we'll see Lucknow/Gomti river with holy bathing and apparently less polution/death and Khajuraho/Kama Sutra - but other than that we'll really only have missed Hampi, i.e. a total of 3 sights, on the top 20 to-do list according to Lonely Planet, which I think is pretty impressive - and we will have seen so much more than the top-20 too!).
With this long-standing elephant in the room out of the way (due to the planning and bookings, which we've dreaded a bit for post-Darjeeling - we knew it was going to be hard) we can now finally relax and simply enjoy ourselves for the remainder of the journey with little else to plan - other than local sights and activities as we potter along.
We ordered up room service, which turned out to be even harder than usual due to the language barrier - in fact we kind of gave up and had the staff instead come up to our room and take the orders directly from the menu because they were asking if we wanted the cheese for a Pizza Quatro Stagioni on the side and have it plastered with cucumber... WTF?!?!?!?! Anyway, Claire relented in the end and had herself an alternative pizza in the form of a chicken pizza - thankfully they didn't ask us if we wanted the chicken on the side - at that stage we would have probably hurt them ;-) I had a chicken spring roll (a.k.a. non-vegetarian when you order although the menu says chicken - never mind...) and a Hot and Sour Chicken soup. We also ordered a portion of chips - but, they were out of chips.
Thankfully the food turned out to be relatively OK - but we decided not to order anymore room service here - it's just too challenging and could involve a heart attack or two as well ;-)
Afterwards we simply relaxed in bed while watching movies and Burn Notice from my laptop on the in-room Samsung LCD TV - all hail HDMI cables and my decision to bring one ;-)
Afterwards we returned to the room and decided to spend the afternoon booking our onwards journey. Trains in this country are really tricky to book for two reasons: 1) Availability; AC1 (first class) and AC2 are really quickly booked up and with only limited capacity and 2) the IRCTC Indian online system really sucks and is so temperamental that every time you click the Book button on either ClearTrip or MakeMyTrip you wait with fingers crossed and bated breath, praying to the powers that be that this will not be yet another incident where payment is taken (but ultimately refunded to the credit card in a matter of a couple of days) but you're left we a failed booking of trains&seats, which has happened probably during 25% of our bookings.
Anyway, after much planning, staring a maps and to'ing and fro'ing we managed to book the transport side of things for the rest of our trip, which from Darjeeling includes: flights from Bagdogra to Amritsar via Delhi (3h10m stopover, Jet Air, which we've used before - 2 nights there), train from Amritsar to Lucknow (1 night in a Taj), train from Lucknow to Jaipur (2 nights), train from Jaipur to Mount Abu (Abu Road - 5 nights), train from Abu Road to Jodhpur (3 nights), train from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer (3 nights) and finally train from Jaisalmer to Delhi (5 nights). We also managed to book accommodation on the way until Jodhpur - so we still got Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and finally New Delhi to book in terms of accommodation.
After this, our brains were fried (remember, that planning involves making decisions on what we want to see - and discussions of what we are going to have to miss, which is really painful, given that some of the decisions have to be taken based on how far off the route it is, whether it's in bandit country (read: Bihar;-) and how bothered we are - the "missed sights" list includes Varanassi/Ganges river although we'll see Lucknow/Gomti river with holy bathing and apparently less polution/death and Khajuraho/Kama Sutra - but other than that we'll really only have missed Hampi, i.e. a total of 3 sights, on the top 20 to-do list according to Lonely Planet, which I think is pretty impressive - and we will have seen so much more than the top-20 too!).
With this long-standing elephant in the room out of the way (due to the planning and bookings, which we've dreaded a bit for post-Darjeeling - we knew it was going to be hard) we can now finally relax and simply enjoy ourselves for the remainder of the journey with little else to plan - other than local sights and activities as we potter along.
We ordered up room service, which turned out to be even harder than usual due to the language barrier - in fact we kind of gave up and had the staff instead come up to our room and take the orders directly from the menu because they were asking if we wanted the cheese for a Pizza Quatro Stagioni on the side and have it plastered with cucumber... WTF?!?!?!?! Anyway, Claire relented in the end and had herself an alternative pizza in the form of a chicken pizza - thankfully they didn't ask us if we wanted the chicken on the side - at that stage we would have probably hurt them ;-) I had a chicken spring roll (a.k.a. non-vegetarian when you order although the menu says chicken - never mind...) and a Hot and Sour Chicken soup. We also ordered a portion of chips - but, they were out of chips.
Thankfully the food turned out to be relatively OK - but we decided not to order anymore room service here - it's just too challenging and could involve a heart attack or two as well ;-)
Afterwards we simply relaxed in bed while watching movies and Burn Notice from my laptop on the in-room Samsung LCD TV - all hail HDMI cables and my decision to bring one ;-)
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