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Whitneys on Tour
We arrived here on 20th May but to be honest the city and all it's dubious charms were rather lost on us as we had travel hassles to sort out thanks to the ongoing Nepal political situation which has cointinued to deteriorate.
Our current tour company, The Imaginative Traveller has now decided that they won't take the tour into Nepal and finish in Kathmandu as they feel it's too risky now. We understand their point of view but we are absolutely furious about the single alternative they have offered us which is to drag out the Indian part of the trip by 4 days by including an uneccessary 2 extra days in Varanasi and then finishing up with 3 days in that s**thole, otherwise known as Delhi. This is no good to us even if we wanted to do it as our Indian visa runs out on 26th April (the day the group was due to enter Nepal) and we hear outstaying your visa here will bring police involvement so thats a non-starter.
Imaginative Traveller have flat refused to refund any part of our trip nor have they let us go to Delhi early with some of the other group members who were on a shorter trip which finished in Delhi anyway. It's basically their back of fag packet amended itinery or nothing and we're disgusted with them, and so is everyone else in the tour group .Their behaviour and attitude has lost them considerable goodwill now which is a shame as the tour has been well run up untill now.
What complicates things even further for us is that we have our Tibet and Himalayas trip starting from Kathmandu on 4th May and GAP Travel whom are running this trip say it's still going ahead, despite the troubles. However, they have given us an option to switch to another trip or postpone this one and it's the latter option we've decided to take. We could, in theory travel overland to Kathmandu from India ourselves but we consider this too risky as we've heard internal flights in Nepal have been stopped and road travel runs the risk of serious roadblocks from protesters. We also think flying in from India is too risky as we would have to leave India on 26th April then spend over a week in Kathmandu, a city under curfew with an ever worsening situation, a possibility of a civil war with the airports for international flights being closed.
Therefore we're going to go to Varanasi with what remains of the tour group from Agra, spend one day there then make our own way to Delhi and fly to Bangkok from there, meaning we lose out on 5 days of this trip we've paid for. Our plan now is to travel S.E Asia early then fly to Nepal in mid June to do that trip providing the situation has improved. This has cost us alot of money in additional flights not to mention the lost value on our India trip which we can't finish and we'll probably have to cut our trip short because of it but we're convinced we've made the right decision as every time we watch the news Nepal features very highly and the problems are getting worse. If we do cut our trip short it won't be too much of a problem as we'll still have plenty of time to do all we want to.
Anyway, back to Japiur! Busy, hot city with red bricked building in the city centre and with the obligatory fort on the city outskirts which we visited although we're getting a little fort-ed out now to be honest. Despite this and the travel hassles we're having fun on this trip and our tour group are great.
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