I.N.spired - Confirmed Route

Well finally, this is more or less the confirmed route for I.N.spired 08/09. The trick is to traverse both the Indian subcontinent and Nepalese soil in 2 weeks and granted that transportation is top notch, the journey durations are no joke. But I guess India is all about its trains and by God's grace we could catch colourful snippets of this motherland through their windows.

We're left with booking accommodations in Agra and Varanasi and applying for the Indian visa (SGD59) by Wednesday. Also, Aly may be joining us after all provided he could convince his parents that he'd be absolutely away from harm (Delhi is a no-no). Let's just pray that he'd be able to come along.

Oh, and by some twist of fate, our Singapore-Chennai flight got rescheduled to 2 hours earlier which means we would touch down in Chennai before midnight to hopefully catch an early morning train to Agra pronto!

I.N.spired - Himalayan Breeze

Finally met up with Faruq for a quick discussion last Saturday. Although we spent more than half the time at Al-Majlis watching the Liverpool and Man United matches, we've decided on a skeleton of what, or rather how, the northern route and the eventual traverse into Nepalese territory should look like:

While the route is pretty much tried and tested, the exact prices and duration of bus journeys aren't. Pieces of information on transport throughout India and Nepal are generally sketchy so we basically rely heavily on Lonely Planet. Nonetheless, it seems incredulous for all bus journeys within Nepal to be 8 hours long.

What proves to be a bigger pain in the arse is designing the fastest route from Chennai to Agra and from Patna back to Chennai. So far, our only options are a 24 hours Delhi-bound train between Chennai and Agra and the more harrowing Patna-Kolkata (10 hours) and Kolkata-Chennai (28 hours) ass-ripper.

A New Adventure - I.N.spired

India - Nepal 08/09

It's been a long time since this blog was revisited and after dusting all the cobwebs from the cyber corners, I'm ready to inject new blood onto this page all over again. I've always been fascinated by India and Nepal and the opportunity just presented itself. I know, the recent spate of bombings at Mumbai and possible future insurgencies and attacks now expected at all Indian urban magnets should have deterred us from carrying on with our plans. But to stay away from it altogether would have rendered the terrorists victors. Anyway, here's what I.N.spired looks like for us at the moment:


Faruq and I have yet to meet up for a good round of planning. We have between Kashmir and Nepal to choose from and given the subliminal beauty of both regions (the latter being a country for the uninitiated) it's set to be a tough thug.