Berlitz Pocket Guide India

• Publisher: Berlitz Travel
• ISBN:
  9781785730580
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

India is like nowhere else on earth, boasting the snow-capped Himalayan Mountains in the north, arid deserts in the centre, palm-fringed beaches and lazy backwaters in the south. With well over 1 billion inhabitants, India is a fascinating melting pot of cultures and religions that is completely unique. Berlitz Pocket Guide India is a concise, full-colour travel guide that combines lively text with vivid photography to highlight the best that the country has to offer.

Inside India Pocket Guide:

Where To Go details all the key sights in the country, while handy maps on the cover flaps help you find your way around, and are cross-referenced to the text.

Top 10 Attractions gives a run-down of the best sights to take in on your trip.

Perfect Tour provides an itinerary of the country.

What To Do is a snapshot of ways to spend your spare time, from hiking in the Himalayas, to marvelling at the Taj Mahal, to soaking up the sun on a beach in Goa.

Essential information on India's culture, including a brief history of the country.

Eating Out covers the country's best cuisine.

Curated listings of the best hotels and restaurants.

A-Z of all the practical information you'll need.

About Berlitz: Berlitz draws on years of travel and language expertise to bring you a wide range of travel and language products, including travel guides, maps, phrase books, language-learning courses, dictionaries and kids' language products.

Where To Go

Where, indeed? The subcontinent is so rich and varied that the choice of what to see on a first visit can be daunting. Don’t even think of ‘doing’ India the way people ‘do’ Europe. With some judicious selection from among the places we suggest, you can most certainly get a pretty good feel for the country in the four weeks that most visitors devote to a first trip.

Even if you have a distinct taste for improvisation and a horror of schedules and detailed itineraries, you must accept from the outset, if your time is at all limited, that travelling around India will demand a certain amount of planning. Remember, there are over one billion Indians out there, and a lot of them will be on the move at the same time as you will be, so you will at least need to make some advance reservations for hotels in principal cities and for your major plane or train journeys. This will still leave you plenty of room for getting off the beaten track and staying overnight in new and unexpected places.

Watchtower at Jairgarh Fort, Jaipur

Getty Images

Getting Around

The guide is divided into the following broad sections: Delhi, The North, Rajasthan, The West, The East and The South. It’s easy to pick and mix according to time and inclination. Thus, if wanting to follow the classic Golden Triangle route (Delhi, Agra, Jaipur), see the Perfect Tour (for more information click here) and refer to the different relevant sections (Delhi, The North and Rajasthan). Those wishing to follow the Ganges plain all the way from west to east will be able to glean their information from both ‘The North’ and ‘The East’. For international visitors the starting points are Delhi for the north, Mumbai for the west, Kolkata for the east and Chennai or Thiruvananthapuram for the south.

It’s possible to overdose on cultural sights, so a selection of other attractions such as nature reserves and national parks, beach resorts, hill stations, deserts and mountains will be part of most people’s itinerary. Even if your budget allows you to fly around the country, you will never be able to cover everything, so it’s best to design a ‘menu’ of places to see in each region.

Hitching a ride on a train in Kerala

Britta Jaschinski/Apa Publications

If you’re travelling by train (for more information, click here) and rate comfort above improvisation, go first class with an Indrail pass. Indrail passes come in three classes, and their main advantage is that they can get you access to ‘quotas’ when the train is allegedly ‘full’. However, travelling with an Indrail pass is a lot more expensive and doesn’t always speed up booking.

Flying offers another increasingly viable way of covering long distances with relative ease, thanks to the recent explosion in domestic air services, with a profusion of airlines offering flights to virtually every city of consequence in the country. Click here for further details of the relevant airlines. The ‘Visit India’ scheme run by Jet Airways (www.jetairways.com) offers one- to three-week India-wide air passes, a convenient, if not especially cheap, option.

Tourist information offices can be very helpful. You will find their guides are much more reliable than those outside the temples or palaces, but one word of warning: different tour guides will give contradictory explanations about the significance of statues as well as many different versions of legend and historical ‘fact’. It would be easy to dismiss these explanations as being nonsense, but you’ll understand India better if you can appreciate that what each guide is saying may in its own way be true.

Practical hints

The climate in India imposes its own imperatives and restrictions on your itinerary. The Himalayan regions are simply impractical in winter, Delhi unbearably hot in June, and flights everywhere uncertain in the monsoon. Think of three seasons – cool, hot and wet – emphasised here because they take on a particular meaning in the Indian context. The cool season is from November to February, the ideal time for seeing most of India (except the northern hills and mountains, where it’s bitterly cold). Cool means it is pleasantly warm by day and fresh enough for a sweater in the evening. The temperature begins to rise by mid-February. Hot, from mid-March to June, is hot as people only rarely experience it. The cities and plains in this season are definitely a bad bet, but the hill stations will be at their best. From mid-June through September, wet means monsoon-wet, not all day every day, but torrential rains occur often enough to make travel uncertain and the mosquitoes and other bugs a real nuisance. However, during this time the country is at its most green, and the monuments, especially the Taj Mahal, take on a glistening beauty.

With regard to your health (for more information, click here), two attitudes almost guarantee a miserable time: carelessness and hypochondria. Take elementary precautions by sticking to bottled drinks and freshly cooked food, and you shouldn’t have any serious stomach problems. An occasional touch of ‘Delhi belly’ is unavoidable when you’re not used to the spicy food, but nothing to worry about; take it easy and drink lots of liquids, and it will pass. If you are on a short trip, you may need to take a quick-acting remedy to keep you on your feet, but if you load up with antibiotics and a host of other patent medicines, your body will never build up resistance, and the next attack will just be worse.

It is essential to protect yourself from the heat. Save your sun-tanning for the beach or the hotel swimming pool. Otherwise, stay out of the sun. Wear a nicely ventilated hat and keep to the shade in the street. Try to do your open-air sightseeing in the morning and late afternoon. Take a siesta after lunch. Drink plenty of liquids – in the heat, dehydration is more of a risk than an upset stomach.

In all senses of the word, stay cool. In the first few days jet-lag, acclimatisation and culture shock may lead you to lose your temper when you see the airports, railways and hotels not organised in a way you’re used to, but don’t forget that John Kenneth Galbraith called it a functioning anarchy. Count to ten, and, like Delhi belly, it’ll pass. Airports, railway stations and hotels can be a pain anywhere in the world these days. Indians are mostly cheerful, responding much more readily to a smile than a scowl.

The red tape can at times seem like barbed wire, but this, too, can be handled. Part of India’s legacy after several centuries of bureaucracy (don’t just blame the British civil service – it began long before) is an inordinate respect for the written document and the rubber stamp. Don’t knock it – use it. Vouchers, passes, letters of introduction and printed business cards all work like magic when a ‘confirmed’ reservation has become ‘unconfirmed’.

Echoing around every office you will hear the cheerful phrase: ‘No problem’. Though it rarely means exactly this, interpret it as meaning ‘no catastrophe’ and have a good time anyway.

A busy street in Old Delhi

Julian Love/Apa Publications

Delhi

Situated on the Yamuna (Jumna) River, Delhi 1 [map] was repeatedly a target for conquerors from the northwest. They each very often destroyed the work of their predecessors, but the city remains a fascinating compendium of India’s imperial history.

Recent archaeological finds suggest that a site on the Yamuna may have been the home of Mahabharata hero Yudhishthira, dating back to 1000 BC. A rock inscription from Emperor Asoka indicates that Delhi was a major point on the trade route between the northwest frontier and Bengal in the 3rd century BC.

The Tomara Rajputs made it their capital in AD 736, with the name of Dhillika, and it was a focus of clan wars until the Muslims conquered it and Qutb-ud-din Aybak set up his Sultanate in 1206. Delhi was dismantled to make way for new monuments, which then suffered from the devastating passage of Timur in 1398. He took away 90 elephant-loads of building materials and thousands of skilled Delhi stonemasons and sculptors to work at his capital in Samarkand. With the advent of the Mughals in 1526, Delhi alternated with Agra as the capital, and each ruler asserted his particular taste in architectural caprice.

Under the Brit...