Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Calcutta, Varanasi, Mumbai & Chennai

After many years, I am writing again. This time, I want to share my trip to India (yes, again). But we chose different route, KL-Calcutta, Calcutta-Varanasi, Varanasi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Chennai and then Chennai-KL.

PART 1: Calcutta @ Kolkata

March 2, 2017:

Our flight from KLIA left at 10.30pm. I felt like it was one of the longest flight I had ever been with the lights always switched on, and so I was unable to sleep. A noisy kid on place did not make the trip any better, especially with his loud wailing - he looks at least 10 years-old and the thing is, the parents aced as if nothing was wrong with his behaviour. For a kid, he sure has a loud voice.
So anyway, we landed at about 12 and managed to find a taxi to our hotel, Esteem Hotel in South Calcutta for Rs700. The journey took us almost 45 minutes.


March 3, 2017:

We were told there was food in the hotel, buffet for Rs150 per person (about RM10). But when we saw the setting, a room with chairs and three stainless steel food covering, we decided to try food outside.










Co-incidently, there was a wedding group staying in the same hotel as us. The bride and bridegroom were just leaving as we came back to the hotel. One thing that I must mention is that the staff at the hotel were very helpful. Two of them, Abinesh and Nitesh were particularly nice and spoke good English. They helped us with Uber and Ola cars as we did not have a local sim card and were relying on hotel wifi.

Upon their advice, we hired an Ola car to take us on a four hour ride. We were taken to the Kali ghat, Howrah bridge and then the New Market where we did some shopping. The car then dropped us back to the hotel. The whole ride was Rs980.

I had read about this Kalighat temple and therefore can say that I had been fairly warned of people trying to con us into parting with our money. Despite that, we still spent Rs2,000 for VIP pass to see the deity and for the guide.









Here are some of the things you can get at the New market and the area surrounding it.










A short nap later, we went out looking for an Airtel simcard. After getting one for Rs114, we were told to wait for two hours before the sim card is activated. To kill time we went to Gariahat Market. I even got two kurtis for Rs200 each.

We also had food at the market before heading back to our room.

Our flight to Varanasi was at 8.20am the next day.