Traveling to South India

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We're leaving for Mumbai and heading south next week. We've never been to India, but thought it would be fascinating to explore, primarily entranced by the spicy food and memories of idyllic sounding accounts by traveling food writers. A shallow reason to visit a country, perhaps, but foodways reflect the center of people's lives, I think. A couple of our colleagues have been on recent trips, either with students to some of the tiger preserves, or to collect aquatic insects in the Western Ghats, and they're keen on the experience. We have lots of Indian students at our university -- reason enough to learn more about their country. (A recent call about a credit card transaction had me talking with a nice person with an Indian accent, who turned out to be based in Mumbai, and was delighted when I said I'd be visiting his country soon.)

We pick our destinations a bit serendipitously; is the weather decent over semester break? This ruled out Indonesia and Malaysia. Is the airfare decent? This is not easy anymore. We paid for our tickets way in advance after booking late last summer, and I'm surprised when I noticed recently what the fare was. It seemed good at the time. Yikes. Are there interesting natural areas to visit? Yes, India is a huge country, with quite a few national parks and preserves, and a tremendous heritage of biological diversity and South India is particularly rich in diversity.

We (at least me) are always a bit apprehensive before setting off. We don't go on tours, rather copying the best ideas from organized adventure travel companies. So I'm the trip planner. If I've been exceptionally busy, as I have this fall, I always feel like I haven't planned enough. But, we have a hotel for the first few nights in Mumbai, they'll pick us up at the airport, and I'm sure that the rest will be fine. It's always been great in the past; I plan out a tentative itinerary, allowing much more time than any tour would allow, so we can spend more time as we like.

We'll try to get the day train on the Konkan Railway south (you can only reserve the night train online from abroad). This train (the path of which was only finished in the last decade) apparently travels through some amazing scenery and skirts the edge of the Arabian Sea at times. Why would we want to do this overnight?

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