Having gathered together a veritable supply of tour brochures we needed to make a few decisions - the first of which was "Are we going to do this?". Once that was settled it was a question of how we go about organising the tour - or can we find a tour that meets our needs (cheaper option)
After much searching through the brochures we did manage to find one tour that would have given us 85% of what we were thinking that we would like to do - however as it is unlikely that we will be going back then we wanted to make sure that we included everything that we wanted.
This then came down to having to have a "tailor made" tour (expensive option) for us - especially as we kept adding more on to it. So next question was who do we go with? There are several companies that specialise in creating tailor made tours and I narrowed it down to three:
- Abercrombie & Kent
- Audley Travel
- Travelsphere
Now one of the consequences of ordering brochures from some of these companies (the expensive ones) is that THEY contact you. Normally I am not interested in speaking to these people but on this occasion it seemed like a good idea as I was able to glean information from them. By this stage it had become apparently clear that a DIY tour was not going to be an option.
After much deliberation we decided that we would use Audley Travel - at least to see what they could offer, and this was where things stayed for a while as it was too early to start definite planning.
So although we were not dealing with the tour company I spent many hours with various spreadsheets trying to come up with an itinerary - not knowing at this stage whether it would be feasible, practical or affordable.
One thing that I very quickly discovered was that the "Golden Triangle" in India has some of the most expensive hotels on the planet - the "rack rate" for the lowest grade of room in some hotels is in excess of £500 per night, but as we had decided that this was to be a holiday of a lifetime that we would not allow such trivialities to stand in our way.
Creating an itinerary started off as being quite simple we would do a tour of the Golden Triangle followed by a week or so in Goa. Then I decided that as we were so close that I would like to go to Kolkata (aka Calcutta) as my uncle is buried in the CWGC cemetery there. This then quickly progressed to being a four and a half week grand tour.