The mechanics

With Nalina Patel, the tour leader

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Here's some details of how the trip works.

The transportation is all by a bus. There were about 46 people in the group which fit reasonably comfortably into the bus. All the travelling between the different places was done using the same bus so that made things more comfortable. For touring within some of the cities we occasionally used another bus. Typically we would spend not more than 1 night at a hotel, so the schedule would be travelling and sightseeing all day, check into a hotel and lug your luggage in from the bus at night, have breakfast and check out early next morning and on to a new place and a new hotel. The hotels were all very nice. There was a tour leader who did all the arrangements and co-ordination, and local guides for each city.



Our trusty bus that saw us through the trip.


Food arrangements were quite interesting. Most of the meals were taken care of and provided by Cox & Kings, which was quite important, as that way minimal time was spent on figuring out what to do for food. All the food was Indian, which was quite critical for a lot of the people, although it was definitely disappointing to taste so little of the local cuisine. We had some of the meals at local Indian restaurants. The other meals were done by an interesting arrangement: there was a travelling van which had cooking facilities, and this van would follow us around and meet us at lunchtime and provide the meals. In a couple of cases there was a packed lunch, that the caravan prepared.



The cooking van
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Managing a herd of 45 Indians was not an easy task and the tour leader had a thankless job.
We covered so much ground that understandably we didn't spend too much time at any one place or city, which could get frustrating, but that was the understanding for taking the trip. The upside is that you can squeeze in so many high points and cool stuff. Also since the tour company has so much experience they are able to pick out some cool things which as an individual traveller you may miss out. And I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtfulness that went into figuring out the itenary and stuff to do at some of the places. At Paris we went for a show at the Lido theater which was a cool experience and not something most people would get the idea to do. Several of the excursions were made 'optional', so you could opt in or opt out and if you opted out, you had the day free to do what you wanted. This turned out to be a bit of clever marketing, as the optional things were pretty much all the really cool stuff and it didn't make sense to miss them out. So by making them optional the company was able to advertise significantly lower costs that actually would make sense for such a tour.
There are lots of group dynamics with such a large group spending so much time together for so long. At the very personal level, there was some friction between me and Priya but that was something I was expecting anyway and it was less than I expected, so pretty good! Priya was pretty good about handling some of the difficulties of the trip and adjusting with moods. In the broader group, I would think there is real scope for lots of arguments breaking out, but thankfully it was pretty good and people seemed to be able to manange their issues. There was a fair amount of behind the back bitching especially from the women, which always sends me up the wall. A real issue for our group was sticking to schedules, we could never be back at the bus at the required time, after going for sightseeing or having a meal. It really drove our tour leader up the wall, and towards the end of the tour it upset her so much that it started affected the atmosphere. We had to skip seeing Brussels because of the lack of time as a result of this. Another thing was making sure everybody was on the bus or with the group and had not got left behind. On the very first day one family got separated from the rest and that was such a discomfiting experience for everyone that there was no major incident after that.



Group photo (but missing a bunch of people).