Chainrings and Chai

Back on the Road: Agra to Jaipur

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Hoge) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:45:00 +0000

Having gotten into the early-to-rise rhythm with our previous day's dawn visit to the Taj Mahal, we had the bikes packed and out in the street in front of the Shanti Lodge by 8AM. We got the sense that cycling out of Agra wouldn't be quite the death match that Delhi was, so we decided to try riding out of town on our own.
I had an Agra city map we picked up in Delhi folded into my map holder, and it actually served quite well, augmented with just a couple of prompts from well-meaning passers-by. The

tangle of streets around Taj Ganj gave way to some broad signed avenues that offered easy riding even at rush hour. But then the route closed back down to market streets and multiple railway crossings as we purposely diverged from the most direct route to our day's destination at Batephur to follow a smaller highway that would take us through Fatehpur Sikri for a lunch stop.

The road to Fatehpur Sikri gave us a first taste of what cycling India might be like away from the national highway system. The bumpy two-laner with no shoulder required us to constantly watch the surface for holes and obstructions as well as look ahead for overtaking traffic aimed directly towards us - most typically a careening bus with its horn blaring (thanks for the heads up...). After only 20 km or so, however, the country road gave way to a new expressway, barely a year old, that was more worthy of this route's official designation as "NH 11", and sporting the four lanes and wide shoulders we'd been introduced to on NH 2 from Delhi. And here, away from the big cities, we encountered much less of the hazardous contra-flow traffic that made the Delhi-Agra ride so nerve-wracking.

In late morning we crossed the line into the State of Rajasthan and stopped for a photo, then just a few klicks later we pulled off the expressway and on down the old Agra road that runs past the fort at Fatehpur Sikri. Though everyone raves about this World Heritage site, we knew we wouldn't be able to do it justice and still make another 30km to our day's goal at the town of Bharatpur, so we chose to treat it as just a lunch stop - though Kate did get waylaid for a bit of souvenir shopping in the nearby tourist ghetto.

Bharatpur is at the edge of Keoladeo National Park, a wildlife sanctuary that draws serious birders from all over the world. However, Rajasthan is in the midst of multiyear drought, and with no water in the sanctuary's lake, there was plenty of availability at our first choice of accommodation, the Birder's Inn, where we procured an amazingly palatial room - all marble, painted ceilings and a huge bed - at the budget price of 2150 Rs. And it was nice indeed to have such a comfortable spot to hang out, because something I'd had for lunch in Fatehpur Sikri put me out of commission for the entire following day. After dealing with various and sundry tummy rumblings for the previous two weeks this was our first true encounter with the fabled Delhi Belly.

So after the enforced extra rest day at the Birder's Inn - Kate took a sunset rickshaw ride through the sanctuary and I made a lightning run to a nearby internet shop - I tanked myself up on Lomotil and we got back out on the highway bright and early for a run to our next stop at the town of Mahwah. On this stretch we were well into the margins of the Lonely Planet, the Rough Guide and most online sources, which only cover legit tourist destinations, but local intelligence had confirmed the existence of an RTDC-run (Indian Government) "Midway Hotel" in Mahwah.

The 63km ride was substantially similar to our approach into Bharatpur, a smooth new 4 lane expressway cutting through the mustard fields and shaded by eucalyptus. If anything, the traffic was even lighter out here and we encountered fewer of the crazy town crossroad scenes as the new highway tends to take a wide bypass around the towns themselves. At the outskirts of Mahwah we began to see signs for the "Mahwah Midway Hotel", and we wisely stuck to the bypass rather than venturing into town. We finally encountered the hotel at the far western edge of Mahwah, though something seemed amiss, since the substantial white edifice we saw didn't match our expectations of a dowdy government-run institution.

It turns out that the "Midway" moniker is a rather generic term in Indian English that applies to traveler's outposts - restaurants, hotels or resorts - that are along otherwise empty sections of a highway somewhere between major cities. It turned out that the "RTDC Midway" we were looking for was in fact half a klick back into Mahwah town - and did indeed turn out to be what we'd expected: a dusty, down-at-the-heels guest-house run by a lackadaisical troupe of government employees-for-life. (It's virtually impossible to be fired from a government job in India.)

So we chose the big white hotel on the highway and for 300 Rs (plus a mysterious 200 Rs baksheesh to the smarmy manager for rustling up real mattresses) we had a perfectly adequate room for the night - despite the weird circular bed constructed from a concrete slab. This place's true raison d'être was luring tour bus passengers in for overpriced lunches and a pass through their vast gift shop, so it turned out we were the only actual overnight guests in the hotel. Still nursing my tender gut, I passed on dinner, but Kate dove into a generous thali - which came back in the middle of the night to deliver up her very own case of Delhi Belly.

Breakfast in the expansive garden the next day was a nice starter, but we still weren't the happiest of campers when we climbed back on the bikes for the day's run to a spot just short of the town of Dausa, where a tip in the cycling blog published by Hendrik Jan Rogge on www.crazyguyonabike.com had cued us to the existence of a somewhat mysterious "palace hotel on a lake". But sure enough, after only 50km we saw the signs for the Umaid Lake Palace Hotel, turning down the long drive to find a 4-story red sandstone palace built in Mughal style at the edge of a (currently dry) lake, with Indian families recreating under tents on the manicured grounds, taking camel rides past the Taj-like reflecting pool with actual operating fountains. A bit of negotiating finagled us a discount to 1800 Rs. for a top-floor room with a sunset-view balcony - though like a lot of these places, Umaid Lake Palace manages to get you in the end with their exorbitant markups on the food.

It was good once again to have found such a comfortable spot, because that evening the scratchy throat and sniffles I'd had since we landed in Delhi finally blossomed into a full fledged headcold with fever and an unstoppable hacking cough. (That at least partially explained the severe bonk I'd experienced the day before, which I'd attributed to a substandard lunch of a handful of cookies and a banana.) Thus ensued an another rest day off the bikes, though without the consolation of a nearby national park for Kate. Nevertheless, she'd done her own course of Lomotil and gamely amused herself with walks around the countryside and explorations through the hotel's nearly complete bookshelf of Penguin classics.

A day of horizontality and a handful of Tylenols put me back in shape for the final 70km run into Jaipur which consisted of more of the same expressway cycling but with a noticeable uptick in traffic. We've also seen a lot more camel-powered vehicles as we've headed west: usually a single-axled wooden cart with balloon tires carrying an impossible-looking load of straw, grain or even bricks, hitched to a stoic-looking beast plodding along the highway shoulder at a respectable 6 km/hour. But sometimes the load and driver are bundled up together atop the camel, or occasionally we'll even see a single bareback rider trotting or galloping down the highway on his steed, the camel clearly enjoying a moment of unburdened freedom (and these work-beasts are always he-camels.)

We've realised that the best food along the highway is from the flashier roadside daubas that seem to be patronised by prosperous Indian families with white SUVs parked out front. But today we stupidly passed up a couple of these and had to settle for a somewhat less savoury and more fly-specked establishment in the industrial suburbs of Jaipur, which didn't much help my still tender stomach (Kate wisely stuck to bananas.) Along this same stretch of highway we began to see stone-yards where teams of (usually) young men are working away carving the sandstone railings, screens, and archways that are ubiquitous in the local architecture. At first we saw only one or two, with the boys squatting over 2-inch thick slabs of pink stone with a chisel and a hammer. It seems impossible that these intricate carvings were all being done by hand, but when we stopped to investigate they told us that no power tools were being used in the process; certainly none were in evidence in the workshops except for large saws and the lathes used for turning columns. The occasional stone-yards gave way to a long section of the road where carving in sandstone as well as marble was the only business being done at all; in between workshops whose yards were filled with panels, columns, religious sculptures and even entire chatris we could see the industrial-scale cutting operations where huge raw boulders were being sawn into workable pieces. On this section of the highway an additional hazard for us was dodging the big yellow mobile cranes trundling up and down the road to and from the cutters - without regard to traffic direction, of course - with huge chunks of stone swinging from their gantries.

A few klicks east of Jaipur the nice federally-built NH 11 expressway took a bypass to the south towards Kota and we were immediately dumped out onto an inauspicious 2-lane local artery littered with rubble, potholes and trash and filled with a honking maelstrom of vehicles punctuated by wandering cows. We'd been warned several times about Jaipur's infamous gridlock, so we thought we were pretty clever to arrive on a Sunday afternoon. But as we rode a winding route over the hill into town - the first actual grade we've had to climb on this trip - and freewheeled into the city proper we realised that we weren't by any means going to escape Jaipur's Delhi-class traffic nightmare. This was also the first place we encountered really aggressive street kids, who started out their wheedling for rupees while we were stuck at a stoplight and ended up grabbing at the panniers until we had to threaten bodily retaliation.

Fortunately we had decent Jaipur city maps, and after only one wrong turn arrived at our destination, the Jaipur Inn, a quirky establishment just a few blocks west of the ancient walls of the Pink City. We rolled off Jaipur's gritty and chaotic streets through a set of high gates and into a peaceful enclosed garden and patio area. We'd phoned ahead to ensure availability and our host Pushpendra came down to welcome us and offer us their unique Treetop Room, an octagonal glass-sided bedroom cantilevered out over the patio and reached by an iron spiral staircase. He assured us that the bikes would be safe from theft parked in the patio, but also suggested a further "anti-fiddling" measure we'd never thought of: cover the bikes with a bunjee-secured tarp (actually just one of their large tablecloths) to reduce the temptation to curious eyes of a pair of American mt. bikes. We had a look at their 5th-floor rooftop cafe, sporting great views of Jaipur and dominated by a wild pair of guest-room towers that double as billboards - in fact, these were the landmarks that originally zeroed us in on the hotel.

Like Delhi, Jaipur just doesn't seem to be a city suited to pleasurable strolling, and somewhat daunted by the prospect of venturing forth to find a good restaurant after a challenging day of cycling we instead opted for dinner at the hotel's simple cafe. Our sightseeing and logistical planning tasks can wait for tomorrow.

A Day in Agra: Visiting the Taj & Agra Fort

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Hoge) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:50:00 +0000

We successfully extracted ourselves from the Shanti Lodge by 6:30AM, and after an excellent breakfast at the nearby Joney's restaurant-cum-hole-in-the-wall, we were already queued up for the 750 Rs tickets with a considerable collection of foreign and domestic tourists when the Taj Mahal gates opened at 7.

The Taj is indeed magical at that hour, and if you sit still and just watch you can see its iconic visage evolve through an entire range of spectral and atmospheric transformations as the morning sun rises through the mist. But we were slightly too type-A to for excessive contemplation at this hour, so we joined the majority of the tourists for the usual picture-snapping orgies and awed explorations throughout the well-maintained grounds. One of our strategies for the early visit was to "beat the crowds", but in truth the Taj grounds are so vast that it would seem hard to ever feel crowded, at least on a weekday.

The cliché regarding "1000 words" well applies in the case of the Taj Mahal, so I will let our photo galleries speak for themselves regarding our visit.

After a full morning strolling the Taj grounds we rode a tuk-tuk over to see the Agra Fort. I remembered wandering somewhat aimlessly through here 20 years ago, and I knew we'd get a lot more out of seeing it this time with a knowledgeable guide. So we walked ever-so-leisurely across the entrance drawbridge, "trolling" for a guide, and hooked one in about 30 seconds. He approached us offering out his guide license, but with his thumb strategically placed over the ID photo. I took it and held it up next to his face - obviously no match - and he chuckled sheepishly. But he seemed like a nice young man, his English was good and he proposed a price somewhat below the official rate, so we agreed, and took off for a most enjoyable 3 hour walk around the fort. With only a half-hour before closing we used our rave recommendations to snag him another group of tourists for a quick last-minute tour.

Having seen what we came for in Agra, we decided not to stay another day as we'd planned, but to just hit the road towards Jaipur bright and early the following morning. We still had plenty of slack in our itinerary to get ourselves up to the city of Bikaner by December 30, the start of their big 3-day Camel Festival - especially since we were planning a public transport leg between Jaipur and Bikaner. But Agra, and especially Taj Ganj, was so patently charmless that we were glad of the prospect of getting out of the city and back into some countryside again.

First day on the road: Delhi to Agra

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Hoge) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000

As promised by Anand, our shuttle driver was waiting for us outside the Eleven B&B 5 minutes ahead of our planned 9AM departure. Bikes and bags stowed in the back of a nice Honda SUV, we dodged and weaved through Delhi rush-hour traffic south along the Mathura Rd towards Agra, our next major destination.

At 2500 Rs for a 60km shuttle, this was a pricey option just to get out of the urban traffic maelstrom, but in retrospect it was totally worth it. We'd recommend this approach to anyone attempting to cycle out of Delhi, though we'd suggest you bargain harder than we did. The Mathura Rd to Agra shares an alignment with one of the new Metro lines currently being built for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and the combination of normal rush-hour madness and construction detours made this route virtually un-rideable.

Our anticipation grew, in the form of a yawning pit in our stomachs, as we approached our drop-off point. The traffic seemed to be thinning only imperceptibly, and the pall and haze we hoped was specific to Delhi appeared to permeate the entire region. Occasionally the countryside opened up to reveal yellow mustard fields bordered by eucalyptus, but then we'd pass a smoke-belching cement factory or be plunged into the honking chaos of another suburban crossroads. We tried to get into the calming spirit of the devotional Hanuman music CD that the driver put on, but two hours of the exact same riff only had the effect of exacerbating our growing tension.

So we felt an admixture of relief with the dread as the driver finally pulled off the highway south of Palwal and we began assembling the bikes. Would everything hang together? We fumbled with the panniers as a small crowd gathered, but they were curious and polite rather than intrusive, and there was even some words of encouragement in English when we explained our itinerary. At the last minute I remembered to tighten down the cleat screws on my brand-new, never-ridden-on, yet-to-be-adjusted Keen SPD sandals (yeah, we really left everything until the last minute); falling over while trying to unclip would have provided even more entertainment than our Indian audience could have hoped for.

But then we were off. The month-long transcontinental tension that had built up to the "actual riding portion" of the bike tour began to dissipate as the comforting feeling of a familiar old bike took over. Tires rolled smoothly, gears meshed accurately and no untoward scraping, clicking, rubbing or squeaking emerged from the vicinity of our panniers. And after a week of acclimatisation in Delhi we weren't completely flummoxed by traveling on the left side of the road. Woo-hoo, we're riding!

Not that we could exactly relax at that point: the busy NH 2 we were on has been upgraded to 4 lanes in the last few years, and although it's a divided highway it still has uncontrolled access. Which means that local traffic, unable to cross the fenced median, travels against the flow of oncoming traffic, typically on the paved shoulder that we had hoped was our safety zone. So that meant that while traveling at 25 km/hr we were also dodging oncoming traffic of various sorts - other bikes, speeding motorcycles, tuk-tuks, tractors, buffalo carts, even full-sized busses and dump trucks - all heading straight for us. The convention we soon discovered was that oncoming vehicles usually expected to pass on our left, closer to the shoulder, which forced us out into traffic. In the sprit of an exception to every rule, however, if the vehicle was a humongous big truck or bus they'd sometimes expect to pass on our right, so as not to risk falling off the shoulder. So we just had to play it by ear.

But fuelled by adrenaline and a sense of accomplishment, we were exultant to reach our lunch spot, a roadside restaurant about half-way to our first-day's goal at Vrindavan, that was not too different than what we were used to finding on our travels through Morocco and Turkey. Like the well-to-do Indian families out for a Saturday drive who were our fellow patrons, we sat outside on plastic chairs under colourful awnings and had a modest feast of daal, veg curry and hot naan fresh out of the tandoor.

The rest of the 86km ride to Vrindavan was more of the same, dodging oncoming traffic and worming our way through the inevitable knot of traffic that collected at each town and cross-road. The only real glitch occurred when I got a pinch-flat rolling over an unseen obstruction on the Vrindavan road and had to stop to change tubes. I was pleased to see that this event attracted only a modest handful of local observers instead of the traffic-clogging crowd of 200 that gathered during my last Indian flat repair while riding across Bihar State in 1988.

Vrindavan is a town on the banks of the Yamuna River that is said to be the site where Krishna came to earth 5000 years ago and where many of his juvenile exploits recounted in the Bhagavad Gita took place. As such it's a holy site for pilgrims world-wide and is said to be home to 5000 temples dedicated to Krishna in his multitudinous incarnations. ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Conciousness, or Hare Krishnas) has a flashy new temple there, and when we'd tried that day to make a reservation at their well-regarded MVP guest house nearby they claimed no availability for that night. But when we just showed up anyway they managed to find an appropriately ascetic though spacious room for us on an upper floor - a practical payoff on my approach in India never to take No as the final answer.

The MVP was an idyllic haven of manicured gardens and stucco bungalows set in what turned out to be a literal shithole of a town. Our early-morning plan to stroll the town and peruse the temples was aborted when we were physically unable to negotiate the bombed-out main street in the face of the Sunday pilgrim traffic, and we gave up our attempts to travel the side lanes after vaulting innumerable open sewers.

So after breakfast in the temple cafe we fought our way through the Sunday pilgrim traffic back to the main highway and made our way towards Agra, facing substantially the same highway conditions and scenery we'd experienced the day before. We were happy to see, however, that the yellowish tint of the sky was giving way to more and more blue. Impatient for lunch, we capitulated at a roadside McDonald's crammed with Indian families out for their Sunday outing - just a few klicks before discovering another string of the kind of roadside restaurants we'd enjoyed so much the day before.

We'd calculated the distance to Agra as somewhat shorter than the previous day, but as we counted down the roadside mile markers to Agra (some in Hindi, some in English) we looked up from what should have been zero kilometers to see a sign saying "Taj Mahal 17km". So it seems the mile markers count down to the city limits, not to the centre of town, with our roadmaps making a somewhat arbitrary split of the difference. The discrepancy can be considerable for a city the size of Agra.

So, route-finding by way of an Agra city map, we chugged along the expressway through the urban traffic chaos until we reached the bank of the Yamuna and then turned south, roughly following the river's course towards the Agra Fort. Finally, beneath the walls of the fort we had our first glimpse of the Taj across the sand flats, achieving a significant if merely symbolic milestone in this early stage of our journey.

Using the Taj as a landmark, we navigated unerringly to the Shanti Lodge in the gritty Taj Ganj neighbourhood, the place (I think?) I stayed when I was here 20 years ago. We checked into our bare-bulb room, large enough to fit the bikes, and immediately repaired to the roof for a refreshment. The only thing Shanti Lodge really has to recommend it is that it's cheap and seems to have the tallest rooftop restaurant in the vicinity, with superb views of the Taj Mahal - though after having a delicious dinner on the nearly-as-tall roof at the nearby Saniya Palace hotel we realised that it would have made a much better choice.

We made an early evening of it so as to be prepared for a sunrise stroll through the Taj Mahal, which opens to tourists at 7am. We went to bed satisfied that we'd accomplished our first goal in the "actual cycling portion" of the trip.

Dilly-Dallying in Delhi

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Hoge) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:00:00 +0000

We arrived at Indira Gandhi International after two long but reasonably comfortable flights full of Indian families - 19 hours in all - and a smooth transfer at Newark. The flawless logistics continued with the prompt and intact arrival of our two bike boxes
on the carousel (they'd better be intact: they cost us US$100 apiece), the cursory wave-through at Immigration and Customs, and the appearance of a driver with our names on a placard and an appropriately-sized SUV to ferry us and the bikes to the G-49 Guesthouse in the Nizamuddin West neighbourhood.

Our planned 4 nights in Delhi - nominally sufficient time to get our feet on the ground and dial in the logistical details - has now stretched to 8 nights. We eventually ran out of availability at G-49 and had to shift over to the Eleven B&B in Nizamuddin East, hosted by the affable Anand, who when he ran out of room then found us yet another place at Amaaya Guesthouse run by the lovely and gracious Rooma.

All manner of circumstances have arisen to delay our departure, but we probably could have jammed out of here a few days earlier - it definitely wasn't Delhi's charms that have captured us. The bald truth is that, just like our procrastination crossing the border from Ceuta into Morocco two years ago, we are still somewhat freaked-out about the road conditions here and to a certain degree are inventing reasons to hang around this grimy, noisy and congested city. (At least in Ceuta we could contemplate our imminent demise over beer and jamon tapas.)

We do have the built-in excuses that we're both suffering respiratory ailments that manifest in sore throats and violent hacking accompanied by a panoply of phlegmatic by-products. Even our squeezable Neti bottle doesn't ameliorate the symptoms. These ailments are no doubt attributable to the abominable air quality here, which was immediately evident from the humid and hazy miasma that had even invaded the arrival concourse at the airport.

We figured out on the first day, after a 3 km trek on foot from Nizamuddin to Conaught Circle, that Delhi definitely is not a walking city. After that experience, we learned to dicker for tuk-tuk shuttles and now manage to maintain a distinctly fatalistic serenity while careening around the chaotic streets of Delhi. The change in Kate's attitude is especially striking, since she normally death-grips the handrest whenever a nearby semi-truck changes lanes on I-25; here we both imagine that the expert manoeuvring of our (typically) Sikh driver has invested the 3-wheeled, CNG-powered tin can on which we're perched with Escalade-class crash-worthiness.

But even though we've been assured that Delhi traffic is the Worst of the Worst and that it's a bit more sane in the countryside, the Delhi Traffic Experience has infected even our dreamlife, resulting in nightly 4AM wake-up terrors. So I think that mostly explains why we're still here, even though it has taken longer than expected to see the sights, take care of shopping and logistics, including obtaining unlock codes for our mobiles from AT&T via Skype and new Airtel SIM cards from the local barbershop-cum-cell phone store.

Our Delhi sightseeing was pretty much limited to Humayun's Tomb, Gandhi's Samadhi (funeral pyre), the Baha'i Lotus Temple, India Gate, the Raj Path and Connaught Circle, where we got scammed for exorbitant taxi fare by a couple of trust-worthy looking middle-aged guys. Our shopping expeditions through the Khan and Lajpat Nagar markets netted a phone headset, a replacement for a lost bike computer and more maps, including the excellent Eicher 1:750,000 Road Atlas of India which we found on the amazing bookshelf at the Turtle Cafe. I even managed to fit in a project fabricating a transparent map holder (OK, I forgot to bring the one I had at home) which was executed by the sewing wallah stationed on the sidewalk with his Singer just outside the neighbourhood Hindu temple.

The last piece of logistics was to arrange for a rush-hour shuttle down the Mathura Rd to get us and the bikes beyond the Delhi Traffic Experience death-radius. Everyone we talked to agreed this would be money well spent (even at 2500 Rs, which appears to include a cut for Anand, who has handled all the details.) So tomorrow morning at 9AM we'll launch ourselves into "the actual biking portion" of this cycle tour, with our next major stop after two days days being Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Hopefully the quick payoff of visiting an iconic global monument so soon in our trip will help motivate the riding on other, less landmark-worthy days.

Bye Bye Boulder

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Hoge) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Well, it looks like we're successfully gonna get the hell out of Dodge. The bikes are in shipping boxes deep in the bowels of DIA somewhere and we've got our passports and boarding passes. What could go wrong now?

I think this has been the most stressful run-up to a trip since Kate and I started traveling together. More than a month ahead of our departure we were both already so keyed up we were dosing on our favorite soporific - Tylenol PM, in the little blue pills - just to sleep through the night. I was concerned about whether I was going to get all the loose ends tied up with gear, bikes and electronics, and Kate was worried about stuff like paying our property tax bills from India, contracting Japanese Encephalitis or getting flattened by a TATA long-hauler.

I pulled my now-traditional all-nighter - why not, if we're flying through 12 time zones? - wherein I finally did the actual packing of my panniers, pulled the backup drives out of our computers for safekeeping, and squeezed in a few last minute crafts projects involving epoxy glue and our cool new Brother sewing machine. In the morning we both tried to eat some oatmeal for breakfast but nothing tasted right and we gave it up as a bad job.

The last thing we did before Stephen picked us up for the drive to the airport was to seal up the bike boxes, which we'd had to bring down into our warm basement since the packing tape wouldn't stick to the cardboard in the minus-digit overnight temperatures. In fact, the cold snap we'd had recently in the 20's with a dump of snow to boot really played havoc with our bike preparations, since we weren't able to do any test rides with them fully loaded on our new rack systems. So we're just crossing our fingers until we get to New Delhi - only 19 hours and one stopover in Newark away on Continental - where we've given ourselves a few days at a nice guesthouse to get our feet on the ground, discover what we forgot to bring and sort out the rest of the details - such as our itinerary!