[curious panda]

My friend and I have had a long standing curiosity in India, and would like to venture there this coming summer. Lurking around this board has helped us immensely, but we still have some questions and were hoping you could answer them.

We were curious what the status of india is after everything that has been going on recently. We're also wondering how much money we should expect to spend if we planned on living there for a few months. Also, how much time should a newbie traveler spend in india for a first trip? Any particularly useful tips you could bestow upon us?

Thank you very much for your advice, and I apologize if it has been answered in another thread. If it makes any difference, I am a high school student who plans to defer for a year from college to travel the world, so my budget isn't very substantial and my experience limited.

Thanks!
-curious.

[curious panda]

Hey, this is Curious' friend: This brings up another quesiton. What areas of India should be avoided because of the terrorist aspect? like you were mentioning Kashmir,Assam,Nagaland etc. Or should those places still not be avoided at all?

Thanks for your time.

~Mike

[machadinha]

Originally Posted by curious panda

Hey, this is Curious' friend: This brings up another quesiton. What areas of India should be avoided because of the terrorist aspect? like you were mentioning Kashmir,Assam,Nagaland etc. Or should those places still not be avoided at all?

It seems to me 2Cents was being more tongue-in-cheek. The places you mention here require some caution (and the North-East seems to go off-limits and back all the time, with different degrees of difficulty and luck needed to get in there) but people do travel there. Parts of (rural) Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are notorious for instances of banditry. But people do travel there, nor are bandits limited to those areas (unlikely to affect tourists though)...

You asked

Originally Posted by curious panda

We were curious what the status of india is after everything that has been going on recently. We're also wondering how much money we should expect to spend if we planned on living there for a few months. Also, how much time should a newbie traveler spend in india for a first trip? Any particularly useful tips you could bestow upon us?

This is far too general to answer just like that. What has been going on recently? If you're referring to the tsunami, unless you're planning to visit specific coastal villages in the South-East I doubt if you'd notice much of anything. As for how much money or time to spend, it again is impossible to say without further info. I'd say the longer the better but you might well be sick of it after three weeks. What are you looking for, what kind of people are you. What do you mean by living in India? Do you want to rent an apartment and stay in one place for several months? India can be very cheap but how cheap is hard to say. If you stay for longer you're likely to stick to a more leisurely pace which can bring your costs down. If you want to stay for longer than 6 months you'd have to look into ways to extend your visa, involving a hop over the border.

[curious panda]

We mean the Tsunami... Sorry for the broadness, but we were wondering about how much of India is really affected by the Tsunami and if its stillsafe to go there, I wouldn't see why not.

Thanks again.

~Mike

[machadinha]

Well as we doctors like to put it (Monty Python take-off there) India is what you call a really really big place and the tsunamis struck a few kilometers inland at the most in very specific areas so as you can imagine... It's like having a tornado in Florida and what it does to the Bay Area. It doesn't mean the people affected were any less affected of course. I'm not taking the piss out of you really, the first time I went there had been a major earthquake and judging from the news here you'd have thought the whole country had been devastated. On enquiring when I arrived in Delhi hardly anyone understood what I was on about to begin with. "Oh yes the earthquake sir, wasn't that three weeks ago in thingumajigistan?"

[Nick-H]

Yes, I had similar worries about the possibilities of riots in Bihar possibly affecting my trip to Kerala a few years back All it took to put my mind at rest was a quick look at an atlas

OTOH, if it is the Tsunami that you are worried about, and you plan to visit Southern India, a quick look at an atlas would make everything look horribly close and make you more worried than you need to be.

It was extensively covered here on IM. Yes, coastal fishing villages were devastated, but many tourist centres were very quickly asking people not to cancel their trip and cause further economic damage.

Mind you, if it's the Taj Mahal you want to see, you don't even need to know what a tsunami is... Better watch out for Dead Parrotts (More Monty Python) though

[machadinha]

Originally Posted by Nick-H

Better watch out for Dead Parrotts (More Monty Python) though

LOL Nick and for some of your other recent answers too
Yes when I first went I was a brave but nonetheless terrified young man. When the news here covered for weeks the terrifying earthquake and then the attempt at a coup in Moscow to boot (where I needed to catch another flight) I thought oh boy here we have it. Of course nothing was amiss anywhere I went. The sad thing is really that if you read in Europe about thousands of dead in India that's just any overgrown small town, any somewhat larger village there would be a major provincial town where I live. I'm not saying that's good or makes it less gruesome but it's the harsh reality.

A final note and I'm sure the OP meant no harm but leave off the calling everyone fighting for their rights a terrorist already, please. It's a little more complicated than that and language soon takes on an Orwellian dimension if you catch my drift. Keeping a high here-come-the-Yanks profile in some places might really not be a good idea in this day and age, and whether you wear the Fugazi shirt or not might not mean so much to the local people.

This is an ex-imperialist so to speak, it has ceased to be.

[Nick-H]

Recently a friend on the phone told me that London had had some snow, and I gloated about my 30C climate. I went on,

"But there is very bad snow in Kashmir: 300 dead in avalanches."

"Really?"

"Yes! You didn't read about it in the UK newspapers?"

One's perspective does change with locality!

On the other hand, I came to know about the flashflood that devastated a tiny Cornish (UK) village, 25 miles away from my mum, last year, through a photo and article in [i]The Hindu![i]

[Digital Drifter]

Give those chaps a break, they're just out of high-school!

Obviously, the questions would be a bit off the scale (OK,OK that's understating it a bit) given their age & experience. Humour them!

Pick someone your own age! Machadinha, Nick, very funny & wipe that grin off your face! both of you!

[Nick-H]

Nothing wrong with a Grin

It is interesting, though, how my perspective on news has changed since I have been living (first time out of UK) here, and I how I feel genuine surprise that big stories in the local press are not even worth a mention in the UK papers.

If the number of deaths from the recent snow in J&K doesn't get a mention, I wonder what else doesn't. And, of course, what isn't getting a mention here.

Anyway, we were all new to India once (unless born here, and even then...) and I'm sure CP & Friend won't mind a little friendly fun.