Is it OK to leave second half of itinerary unplanned?

I leave in 5 days for my month long trip and I'm so excited!! I have most of the first couple weeks planned, hotels, transportation, etc. For the second half, I plan on seeing Goa, Kerala, Puducherry, Mahabalipuram, and fly out of Chennai. I'm thinking of booking a flight from Udaipur to Goa, with just a layover in Mumbai. Haven't quite decided yet. I'm thinking maybe a 9 hr layover and go check out Jehu beach. I haven't determined exactly where in Goa that I want to go. I also don't know where in Kerala for sure, but I do want to rent a houseboat for a day or two. The first half of the trip is sort of hectic, so I want to use the last half to just kind of chill, take some cooking classes, yoga, whatever. I thought I should be able to just play it by ear as I go along. Will that work out okay? Or should I settle on some more concrete plans before I leave for the southern India part of my trip?

Going without to much planning, with room to look for adventures and time to go with the flow, for many this is the real way of travelling. Especially in India, this is easy as well as rewarding. There is so much to see and do that can never be planned.

I went with plans once . . . I was going to land in Calcutta and head generally north and west . . . after three days in Calcutta I found myself on a train headed south . . . haven't planned a trip since. You'll be fine . . .

I agree with the others. Leave plans, preconceptions and worries at home. You will have an amazing time :-)

As I am headlong into this portion of my trip, I will update in case any others also have this question. Here's been my take so far... If you have unlimited time, are not very picky at all about where you sleep, are travelling alone, and only have a small pack, then travelling unplanned might work for you. In my experience so far, it has been very stressful. I've talked to others on this trip and they are finding the same thing. I brought a netbook and have attempted to stay at places with wifi so that I can communicate with home and make travel arrangements as I go. The problem is that power is spotty and a hotel that claims to have wifi may or may not actually have it. I've spent a lot of time on the computer digging through reviews and whatnot when I would have rather been doing something (anything) else, and I like research! It's exhausting. If your plans are set, or mostly set, and you arrive at a location not to your liking, then I can see finding an internet cafe and researching a place to replace that. Personally, I like arriving at my destination and being able to enjoy it instead of worrying about where I will stay next.

A gentleman I spoke with on the train said that it has become much more difficult to find mid-range accommodations in the last year or so because there has been an increase in the population of moderate income Indians. The plane, train, hotels, etc that used to be tourist class are now also being shared by other Indians on vacation. I don't know how much of that is true, but it seems to make sense. Maybe someone else has another interpretation.

Anyway, had I to go back and do it over, I would have reserved all hotels and major travel before I left. Surprisingly, the thing I was most worried about, train travel, has been fairly easy with the proper IRCTC and Cleartrip registration. So far it has been, at least. I've stayed in 3 different classes. AC2 was definitely the most comfortable. Jet Konnect and Jet Airways were pretty comfortable as well.

Obviously, we each have our own travel style. You are relying on the internet to find a place to sleep. I normally mark two or three in the Lonely Planet Guide that sound acceptable, and go to look at them when I get to where I'm going. After reading your tale about Paolim, I'm willing to bet that my frustration level is a lot lower.

I hope your visit to India gets easier.

Ceashel, I suppose I generally fit into the category you mention above of traveling alone and having unlimited time as I will be arriving in India in a few weeks with plans to stay for about a year. However, I was traveling throughout India for 3 weeks earlier this year and found it absolutely pointless to have plans. Sometimes they literally changed hourly. I can be quite an uptight person at home, and it was a great lesson for me to realize that close to nothing goes according to plan in India and it was nice to know that I was able to adapt. Once I started going with the flow and not taking things so seriously is when I really started to enjoy myself. I was alone for 2 out of the 3 weeks but didn't have unlimited time and am always looking for a good place to stay. It sounds like you are figuring out that that doesn't quite work for you and I can understand, at least as far as I think traveling with others can make things more complicated. I am always afraid to make reservations based on websites/photos because most photos seem to be fake. I trust reviews to some extent, but as you mentioned before many reviews are from years ago and who knows what could have changed in that time. I also found it hard to get good wifi, even if advertised. The bad thing about not having a reservation upon arrival in a new city is wondering if anything will be available, but I guess that is the risk I am taking. I suppose I would get on the next train out of there if I was not able to find something. This actually happened to me once in Vienna on a Sunday night with no immediate trains and ALL hotels booked due to a convention in town and no one willing to help. After walking around and not finding anything, I finally went back to the train station and cried to the information lady until she called around and found me a room nearby. Wasn't so bad in the end, although I did feel the need to have pepper spray in my hand while walking down the middle of the dark and sketchy street. I guess the other option would have been to sleep in the train station until morning or the next train, but I am not so sure I would want to take much of a snooze in an Indian train station. Good to know that you are not having issues booking trains. Haven't used the IRCTC and Cleartrip registration and am dreading that.

Anyway, have a great trip and hope everything goes smoothly for you!

We have mad several longer journeys during the last five years and indeed finding a hotel or a last minute train is getting more difficult during these years.

For hotels, they are not so important for us. Using our guidebook or an internet café we select 2 or 3 in the price class of 800 - 1200 rs. The day before we arrive we call one of them. If they have a room we reserve this. Write it done on s scratch of paper helps also with the negotiation with the rickshaw driver. If we don't like the hotel we go to another. In most cases this works fine.

For transport we reserve the longer train trips. For the rest we more and more take local buses or, since we can afford this, hire a taxi.

This is an interesting thread! I have mostly minutely planned our trips beforehand, sometimes months beforehand. We have had our flights prebooked; hotels prebooked; train tickets booked at the first minute of opening of reservations; driver/car prebooked.

On my first trip to India we only reserved the first week, and the rest of the three weeks we improvised. It did mean quite a lot of time spent in internet cafes trying to find accommodation in places we had not yet seen. But it worked well. It meant we were free to swop destinations at the last minute. We would not otherwise have discovered the Andamans!

On subsequent trips we did the advance planning thing, mainly because we had to fit in with other people's plans, and also because we needed permits to go to the North East (Arunachal Pradesh) which necessitated a lot of forethought.

If you are not travelling with other people, and are free to go with the flow, it is probably a great way to do it.

Now I am agonizing over whether to plan in advance for Nagaland or simply arrive there and leave it all to chance. I am tending towards the latter solution, and hoping for some good luck.

I find that the planning doubles the fun of a good holiday - regardless of whether it is India or somewhere else. I get to have the fun of working it out now and then more fun when we travel. My particular interest is taking train trips - if I didn't plan I probably wouldn't get tickets for the ones that I want. We sometimes leave a place thinking that there was more we could have done there. So what? There's nothing to say that we can't go back again.

A good plan will have flexibility and can be set aside if there is a good reason to do so. Most things in India can be cancelled at relatively little penalty. But there are no rules. It's down to the individual. If I had lots of time and no partner requiring a certain standard of comfort I might be tempted to try the "wing it" approach - but I would still take a list of things that I want to see or do.

This is not aimed at the OP but what I do find difficult to understand is the occasional poster who has done no research or planning and doesn't have any ideas about what they want to see or do in India.

TD - Having learned this morning that Nagaland is a prohibition state with only 13 km of railways I know how it fits into my plans.

Kohima, the state capital, apparently doesn't even have a railway out-agency. I did that research for a post on the GCIRC thread. Does the out-agency at Imphal take the lion's share of the Dimapur quotas? Of course my Indian railway experiences are from a different age - when if you couldn't get a berth at the Dehradun booking office you took a bus to Mussoorie and got a seat from the Dehradun quota for their Northern Railway out-agency. This invariably worked off-season.

I've never pre-booked while traveling to Western Europe, even during the height of tourist season, because every airport and major train station has a kiosk to help you find a hotel, and the odds are small that the hotel will be completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, in India, there is no tourist office to help you.

I wouldn't risk unplanned travel in India personally, because I'm picky, though I know someone who traveled all through Kerala without planning anything and she stayed in some lovely heritage hotels.