We are on the last day of prepping for our new film shoot in India and Nepal. Preparing for any travel to India is daunting – the logistics of getting around such a big country and being in the right destination on time with your film equipment intact is tough. We use the express trains for long distance overnight journeys to save time – usually we book the 2-tier AC cabins if available and otherwise it’s the general sleeper coach. Demand is very high for train tickets and it just got much harder for foreigners to book tickets as you now need an Indian telephone number when you book… even on cleartrip.com which is our favorite booking site for Indian travel. We overcame this problem but cannot reveal our secret for fear it may get overused. Even when you book you will probably be on a wait list for the popular train routes.

We also use planes quite a lot and it’s getting much better in India … airports are still very very slow though and there are very limited schedules with some flights only occuring three times per week. For flights I usually book direct with the airlines and this works – Kingfisher, Jetspice, Indigo and jetlite are favorites. On this trip near the end we have to return back to Nepal and this time we are trying Buddha Air with their first flights from India to Kathamandu. Yes, there really is a Buddha in the air!! They start this new route on March 1st and we will be on the first planes.

Apart from all the trains and planes (and a few buses) we will try and blog about the hotels. The good and mostly the bad I think. Our experience of Indian hotels is very mixed and often it’s not a case of you get what you pay for! In some destinations there simply are not good hotel options and in the places where one or two nice hotels exist they are usually booked up, even though they are fairly expensive. Varanasi is one place that comes to mind. Visitors all want to stay on the Ghats beside the river Ganges, and why not – the views are incredible. But the hotels take advantage of this and offer some very unnacceptable lodging and very dubious practices of trying to extort more money out of their guests… they really need to clean that up. We are not saying they all do this but just a few and they know it. It all adds up to the fun!

We will try and continue this blog throughout our journey and that depends on the internet of course. So please come back and check. Cheers, Jon.