Although the blog post is nearly a month old, I completely missed it when it was first posted. It’s called “How to travel to India”, but it’s really more about how to get the best of your visit while you’re there. I’ve never been to India (and it seems unlikely I’ll ever get to visit), but from reading the accounts of other visitors, Tyler has some excellent advice here:
4. Every single part of India is interesting and worth visiting, as far as I can tell after five trips. That said, I find Bangalore quite over-visited relative to its level of interest.
5. My favorite places in India are Mumbai, Chennai, Rajasthan, and Kolkaata. Still, I could imagine a rational person with interests broadly similar to my own having a quite different list.
6. India has the best food in the world. It is not only permissible but indeed recommended to take all of your meals in fancy hotel restaurants. Do not eat the street food in India (and I eat it virtually everywhere else). It is also permissible to find two or three very good hotel restaurants — or even one — and simply run through their menus. You won’t be disappointed.
7. Invest in a very, very good hotel. It is affordable, and you will need it, and it will be a special memory all its own.
8. Being driven around in the Indian countryside is terrifying (and I have low standards here, I do this all the time in other non-rich countries). If it were safer, I would see many more parts of India. But it isn’t. So I don’t.
I’ve posted this before, and it doesn’t really relate to Tyler’s travel tips, but I still find it amusing:
